Home Truths
by Ooshka
Summary: AH/OOC Continuation of the series that started with Homestay. Follows Home is Where the Heart is. Eric and Sookie cope with their growing family, and a few legacies from Eric's past.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N Yes, I am back. Nothing much exciting to report. Thanks to all of you who enjoyed the last chapter of Home is Where the Heart is and let me know. The fact you all love these characters as much as me, keeps me chugging along.**

**So this story starts after the epilogue to Homestay, and the one-shots Eric Northman is Not Hot! and The Naming of Things. It's early April and Amelia is 14, Felicia 11, Sam 8, Tray 7 and Pam 4. Hope you all enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: The characters do not belong to me.**

SPOV

It was Sunday afternoon so it was designated 'amuse the kids time', well, I think sometimes Eric really wanted to declare it 'hide in the office under the pretext of working time', but I'd discovered that sending Pam in usually ferreted him out. He could only take so much of her trying to draw rainbows across all the emails he'd carefully printed out, before he'd decide he'd finished his work and he'd remerge into a less rainbow-filled environment. And whatever Tray and Sam were up to could generally be guaranteed to be completely rainbow-free. Usually there was yelling, wrestling and large amounts of mud.

But this afternoon we were all outside in the driveway playing basketball. Well, some of us were. Eric, Tray and Sam were playing basketball. Felicia and I were tending more towards netball, as we kept forgetting to dribble, or whatever, and found it easier to just pass the ball to each other. Pam was sitting on the side-lines having a bit of a sulk because she'd wanted to be on Eric's team, but the ruling had been boys versus girls and she thought playing with me and Felicia was less than appealing.

Amelia was over at her friend Yvetta's house. I was trying not to think too much about that one. I wasn't keen on Yvetta, and I really wasn't keen on her mother the failed Russian bride Ana Lyudmila. If anyone should ever be pictured next to the definition of the word slatternly, it was that woman. She made me think of Tanya quite fondly. But sadly these days Emily was on the out, and Yvetta was Amelia's best friend in the whole wide world.

Unless Yvetta had hurt Amelia's feelings again, in which case there'd be tears all evening and I'd be left to pick up the pieces until Amelia had grovelled sufficiently for Yvetta's liking and things could go back to normal again. Well, normal in that Amelia would go back to being haughty and disdainful of us all rather than tearful and melancholy all the time.

In the meantime I, apparently, wasn't doing anything right. "No, Mum!" Sam yelled as I passed to Felicia. "That's not how you play!"

"What?" I asked, as I watched Felicia execute a neat pivot and shoot for a goal. She really was quite good, and of course that was totally due to Eric. Despite the fact he'd probably known less about netball when Felicia started playing than she had, and he'd spent ages fretting about when she was going to be taught to dribble. It took him a while to figure out that wasn't going to happen.

The ball missed the hoop however, and bounced over to where Pam was sitting on the grass; patting Ivan who'd exhausted himself running around excitedly for the first fifteen minutes we were out here and who now wanted a nice lie down and a tummy-rub until he got his second wind.

Pam looked at the ball, and then looked pointedly in the other direction. "Pam!" Tray yelled. "Ball!" Pam muttered something and refused to budge, so Sam stalked over and picked up the ball himself.

"Are you sure you don't want to play?" Eric asked Pam, which nearly made her grumpy expression crack a little. After all, this was the point of sitting on the side-lines looking miserable, she wanted Eric's attention.

Pam shook her head for no. "You can play with me and Mum" Felicia tried. "'Cos we're doing it right. Ow!" Felicia's concern for Pam dissipated the moment Sam hit her square in the back with the ball. "Don't do that, fart-breath!" Felicia said, whirling around and aiming a swipe at Sam that he managed to dodge. Then she picked up the ball and aimed it squarely at his head.

"You couldn't get it in the hoop before" Sam taunted, refusing to move, as Felicia lifted the ball menacingly over her shoulder. She was about to throw it when Eric lifted it out of her hands and she glared at him. "So are we actually playing?" Eric asked.

"Yeah!" Felicia said. "It's not me, anyway. Sam's the one mucking around."

"At least I know the difference between basketball and netball" Sam retorted.

"I don't need to know the difference" Felicia replied. "Because I can actually play netball, can you actually play basketball? No you can't. So just shut up."

"No, you shut up" Sam said.

"I don't think we can play unless everyone shuts up" Eric tried again as Sam and Felicia faced off. After a couple of seconds Sam backed down and looked around. "Where'd Tray go?" he asked.

Yeah, Tray had obviously gotten bored and wandered off. It wasn't the first time it had happened. "Did he go inside?" I asked Pam.

"He's with Ivan" she said, rolling her eyes. Sure enough you could hear the barking coming from the side of the house. I guessed Ivan had got his second wind.

"Pam, do you want to fill in for Tray then?" Eric asked.

"Well…OK" Pam said. "If you really need me." Her face gave away just how thrilled she was that Eric needed her. I half-wondered who had really had the idea about Tray running off with Ivan.

"But you have to actually _play_" Sam instructed her. "You can't just chuck it about like they do" he nodded to Felicia and me. "Because this is basketball, eh Dad?"

"Yeah" Eric agreed.

"Look" I said. "I spent a lot of years practicing my chest passes and I'm buggered if I'm not going to use them when I can."

Sam just rolled his eyes, Felicia looked me up and down like she thought all that practice had been a total waste of time because I was clearly not in her league, and Eric glanced at my boobs when I said the word chest, but then turned back to Pam. He'd lifted Pam up so she could get a goal and she was giggling and had zero interest in anyone else other than Eric anyway.

Tray re-appeared around the side of the house. "Is it OK if…" he started to say as he jogged over. Questions that started with those words were never good; I'd learnt that long ago. So I braced myself. "Ivan eats wood?" Tray finished.

"Wood?" I asked. "What wood?" There had better not be any wood lying around there. It had taken a good couple of years to finally get Calvin to take away the stuff he'd left here after the renovations, longer than the time it had taken to get rid of the detritus we'd had at Merton St. If there was new wood then…oh, Eric and Calvin had better not be building anything else.

However Eric didn't seem any the wiser either. "What wood?" he asked, setting Pam down on the driveway and making her pout.

"The fence" Tray said.

"How can he be eating the fence?" Eric asked.

"He's not eating the fence" I pointed out. "He's digging himself out." Ivan's main mission in life, aside from chewing things, was getting out in order to find new things he could chew in more exotic locations. Kennedy had been very understanding when it was her garden hose that got chewed because she had a dog herself, even if he was now old and grumpy and hated Ivan, which confused the crap out of Ivan because he just wanted to play. But other neighbours might not be so forgiving.

"Oh, for fuck's sake" Eric muttered. "I don't understand what's so fucking interesting about the other side of the fence."

"Freedom, Eric" I pointed out. "Plus there's the joy of the chase."

"Yeah, joy for fucking Ivan. I don't fucking get any joy out of it" Eric replied. We'd walked around the side of the house, and sure enough, there was a nice indentation beneath the fence and one of the wooden palings was slightly askew where he'd worried at it. I wonder how long he'd been planning this escape, or whether it was a spur of the moment kind of thing.

Oh, who was I kidding? I doubted Ivan could plan anything. He kind of lived in the moment and was basically a bundle of barely-controlled energy constantly looking for his next bit of excitement like a junkie looking for his next hit. To be honest he wasn't much better than Sam or Tray, but at least they were starting to grow out of it. I suspected that the fact he was getting past the puppy stage wasn't going to make any difference to Ivan.

"Ivan!" Eric yelled. "IVAN!"

"God, you're loud" I said. "My ears are ringing." He was loud and I'd been standing right next to him.

"Well, I want him to hear me" Eric explained, like I'd missed that one.

"But we don't want the whole neighbourhood to hear us calling him" I pointed out. "It's fine if he's still next door with the Bodehouse's, because honest to God, I swear that woman drinks. If you talk to her past two in the afternoon there's a real slur to her words. But if he's gone on to the Furnan's then we're screwed. I'm pretty sure that guy doesn't like dogs."

Eric looked confused, because of course he was kind of hazy on who our neighbours were. He would have preferred, I think, if we had no neighbours, but short of moving to a lifestyle block out in Rama Rama or Kumeu, there wasn't much we could do about that. He knew Kennedy and Danny, and that was his limit. It was a bit frustrating sometimes, because he tended to blank people in the supermarket who actually lived three doors' down, but so far no one had asked me if he was deaf, so I figured we were good.

A black nose appeared in the hole from the other side of the fence. At least Ivan hadn't gone far then. "Ivan" Eric said. "Get back here."

"No!" I said. "Don't encourage him to dig up their garden. She might drink, but she'll still know who did it if the evidence leads this way. Sam'll go and get him. Sam!"

"What?" Sam yelled back.

"Go next door and haul Ivan back."

"Yeah. Alright" Sam yelled, and I saw him jog down the drive and disappear out the gate. I just hoped Ivan hadn't already been in the fishpond next door. Why we had to go for a breed that liked water, I didn't know.

Eric looked impatient and started to look over the fence, but I grabbed his arm. "She'll see you" I warned.

"Maybe she'll think she imagined me in an alcoholic daydream" Eric said, ignoring me and standing on tip-toe to look over the fence. "Ivan!" he warned. "Get away from the pond! Sam, grab him!"

I wasn't sure what was more worrying, Mrs Bodehouse looking out her window and seeing Ivan and Sam splashing through her fishpond, or her seeing Eric and thinking it was a totally normal daydream. Did Eric really think the housewives of the world all sat at home daydreaming about him? Luckily Sam yelled "I've got him!" and Eric stopped looking over the fence but instead went off to meet them at the gate across the driveway.

Felicia was still practicing her shooting with a certain amount of grim determination. Sadly it wasn't her strong suit and they always put her on defence because of her willingness to be generally intimidating to the opposition. That was maybe one part of her skill-set that Eric wasn't laying direct claim to having coached her in, but I didn't think he was totally above giving her the odd spot of encouragement in that regard.

Sam hauled Ivan back through the gate by his collar which didn't distress Ivan too much, judging by the general amount of tail-wagging that was going on. Ivan seemed to think this was a huge adventure and was rather enjoying himself. Well, he was until he saw Eric looking pissed off about the whole thing.

"Ivan" Eric said, sounding really menacing. "Just fucking stay on this side of the fence, alright?" Well that stopped most of the tail-wagging. Ivan sat down and looked sad and repentant. He'd figured out pretty quickly what the pecking order was in the house and in his mind the order was Eric, followed possibly by Sam, and then the rest of us. The rest of us were interesting in a potential playmate kind of way, but the real authority was Eric, and Ivan was desperate to get Eric's approval. His little canine brain, however, couldn't quite work out that his desire for approval and his desire for excitement were often at odds with each other and so he lived in a desperate cycle where the heady joy of doing something forbidden was closely followed by the deep despair of Eric yelling at him.

Ivan hung his head and looked miserable and Eric decided that was enough lecture for one afternoon. "We'd better go and fill the hole in, I guess" I said. "I feel like I should be reading _The Poky Little Puppy_ to Ivan tonight at bedtime."

Eric looked at me like I'd lost the plot. "I don't think cautionary tales are of much use dealing with a dog, Sookie."

"No, but…it would be nice if it did" I said. To be fair, I wasn't sure that story had ever worked on any of the kids either, but it was a nice thought.

Eric sighed and wandered off, muttering, in the direction of the garage. Hopefully to find a shovel. And maybe some extra pieces of wood to nail over the fence. I hoped he wasn't going to call Calvin to come over on a Sunday afternoon.

"What's Dad doing?" Tray asked me.

"He's got to block the hole" I said. I looked at Ivan, who no longer looked miserable, but was back to watching us to see who was going to do the most interesting thing. Tray, I think, had the same idea. "Oh" he said. "I might go too." He ran off in the direction Eric had gone.

"Where's Daddy?" Pam asked.

"Fixing the fence."

"Who broke the fence? Did Tray break the fence?" Pam was suddenly interested in the fact one of her brothers might be in trouble.

"No, Ivan tried to get out. Again" I informed her.

"Dogs are stupid" Pam grumbled, before walking off into the house.

"You're stupid!" Sam called after her. He patted Ivan's head and Ivan looked at him gratefully. In a pinch Sam would do if Eric wasn't around.

I walked over to the garage. "I'm going to get Amelia!" I yelled.

"OK" Eric yelled back, and then, after a beat he yelled. "Where's the hammer?"

"Don't know" I yelled back,

"Fuck" Eric muttered. At least I think it was him, it could have been Tray commiserating with him. It was hopeless trying to discourage them from swearing as much as Eric did and I tended to be selectively deaf at those moments. I guessed at least that was the only good thing to come out of most of my kids having no grandparents, there were at least less people we knew who were likely to be offended by the stuff that came out of my kids' mouths. Although it had still been embarrassing the day Kassidy loudly exclaimed "Fuck!" as she fell over on her way home after we babysat her for the day. Kennedy had laughed at least rather than been too horrified, but I would have preferred if Kassidy had just held that one in until she was safely in her own front door.

I walked into the house to get my car keys wondering if Calvin was actually going to be here when I got back. I could pretty much guarantee Calvin would know where his hammer was.

My car was out on the street because we'd needed the space the for the game of basketball-netball, so at least I didn't have to do the usual trick of getting someone to watch Ivan for me while I opened the gate to reverse out. Half the time it was easier to just put Ivan in the car with me and take him along, and he kind of enjoyed the ride. I just didn't enjoy the inside of the car windows being covered in dog-slobber from where he'd been watching the world go by.

And Pam really hated it when he slobbered all over her instead. For some reason, possibly because she was the closest to his height, Ivan thought it was totally OK to just drool on her. Pam was not fond of Ivan.

EPOV

Every fucking weekend there was some kind of crisis as something else broke around here, and I wasn't quite sure when it had been decided that I was the person most qualified to fix all the shit when it did break. I didn't feel qualified. Sam was probably more qualified.

And it was one thing if the stuff actually just out-of-the-blue broke, but when the fence was deliberately ripped apart in order for Ivan to make another escape attempt, it was fucking annoying. Somehow, when I'd thought about getting a dog, it hadn't been like this in my mind. For one thing the dogs were always well-behaved and just kind of…well, companionable. Ivan was kind of companionable, in that he liked to follow me around, sit on my feet and make fucking noxious smells that Sookie tried to blame on me, but most of the time he was just looking for an opportunity to destroy things. They don't tell you that when you're researching what dog to buy. Well, maybe they do, but they put it in terms like 'active', 'playful' and the ever-popular 'enjoys being part of the family.' Enjoys fucking eating everything owned by the family more like.

So although I'd known that dogs were expensive, and a lot of work, I maybe hadn't grasped quite what that meant. It might have been better if Sookie had owned a dog when I first met her, as well as a cat and some kids. Then at least I would have known what I was signing us up for, in the way I'd had some idea what kids were going to be like. Actually, in some ways, the kids would have probably given me some insight into what the dog would be like if I thought about it.

"I'm bored" Tray announced, after he'd watch me search in vain for the hammer in the garage. "What are we doing now?"

"I don't know what you're doing, but I, apparently, am fixing the fucking fence" I said. I had no fucking idea where the hammer would be, but I would have thought the garage was a good place to keep it.

"Really? Uncle Calvin isn't coming over to do it?" Tray asked. I wasn't sure whether to be insulted or not. Probably not. Tray really liked Calvin simply because Calvin spent as much time bashing the shit out of stuff as Tray would really have liked to. Stopping Tray bashing the shit out of stuff was the hard part.

"No" I said, and then I thought about it. "Maybe" I amended. "Because I can't find the fucking hammer."

"Um…I think it's in the kitchen drawer" Tray said. "Yeah…it is."

"Why the fuck would it be in the kitchen?" I asked him.

"Um…I was using it…" he said, trailing off and looking shifty.

"Do I want to know what for?" I asked.

"Mum wanted me to help with the wonky shelf" Tray said, sounding quite proud of himself. I knew we had a shelf in the pantry that was in danger of coming down at any moment, but fuck, I wasn't sure Sookie really wanted Tray taking to it with the fucking hammer. "It's all fixed now" he said.

"Really?" I asked him.

"Well…duh, yeah. Ask Mum."

"She's just left" I said. "I heard her car."

"Oh." Tray looked a bit crestfallen. Just then Sam yelled out. "Dad! Dad, Ivan's digging again."

"That fucking dog!" Tray and I joined Sam and we hauled Ivan away from his fucking escape route and into the kitchen, where, sure enough, the hammer was in the kitchen drawer. "I told you" Tray said.

"Yeah" I agreed.

"Look at the shelf" Tray said, proudly. I stuck my head in the pantry and sure enough, the formerly loose shelf was now braced by a fucking weird and ugly kind of bracket with a large amount of nails. "Mum and I did it" Tray said. "Together." It did kind of look like it had Sookie's brand of ingenuity all over it.

Sam muttered something to Tray that I didn't catch, but which didn't sound particularly complimentary and then there was the thud of someone hitting the floor, or possibly the side of the counter-top, and a lot of other sounds which could best be described as wrestling with a lot of muffled cursing.

I wondered whether I was better off just staying facing into the pantry until it was all over, because I'd learnt by now that they'd try to be as silent as possible in order to avoid detection, but I realised I could be here for a while. They were pretty evenly matched, and what Tray was lacking in size he more than made up for in enthusiasm for hurting Sam.

"You know" I mused, still looking at the pantry shelves. "If anyone actually wants to come and help with fixing the fence I'd need to be sure they could be trusted to hold the hammer and not fucking bash anyone else's head in with it. I'm not interested in having fucking savages anywhere near anything I'm holding."

There was another thud, some muttering, a definite mutter of "You've got shit for brains" from someone, and then it all seemed calm enough that I could risk turning around.

"Good job with the shelf, Tray" I said. "Shall we go and fix the fence?"

"Yep" Tray said.

"Sam?" I asked.

"Yeah, alright" he grumbled, and the three of us headed out the door.

SPOV

I pulled up at Ana Lyudmila's house and sighed. It was a small, terraced house in the slightly more industrial end of Mt Eden, one of the many developments from the early '00's that had been tainted with the whole Leaky Homes scandal when poorly constructed homes made of monolithic cladding over untreated timber had leaked like sieves. In fact, when I looked at the water-staining on the outside of the building, I suspected that this place probably was leaky. So currently my daughter was sitting in a grotty house with people I didn't like breathing in noxious gasses from toxic mould. So that thought cheered me up no end.

I knocked on the door and after what seemed like forever, Yvetta answered it, giggling. I had to damp down the feeling she was giggling at me because she thought I was silly and ridiculous. I mean, it was probably a given she didn't think much of me, I was the adult and she was the teenager, but still, it was kind of obvious that she was one of the cool kids and I never had been and even at the ripe old age of 44 there was a part of me that still felt on the outer.

I could kind of see her appeal to Amelia.

"You can come in" Yvetta said, shrugging, like she was doing me the biggest favour in the world. I followed her into the tiny and cluttered living room, where Amelia was sitting on one of a mismatched pair of couches with her feet tucked up underneath her. "Oh" she said. "You're here."

"Yes" I said. "Time to get going."

Amelia sighed, but didn't make a move. "Come on" I said. "It's nearly dinner." Then I turned to Yvetta "Where's your mum?" I asked. I didn't really want to chat to Ana Lyudmila, but I supposed I should say thanks for having my daughter for the day.

Yvetta sat down on the couch next to Amelia and took a handful of potato chips out of a bag that was sitting open on the couch between them. "She's at work" Yvetta said.

Oh. Well I hadn't known that was happening. Ana Lyudmila worked in a café and bar in Kingsland and seemed to work on a shift basis. I didn't want to look down on people who worked in bars, I really didn't, because God knows, at least she had a job. Unlike some of Bill's sisters. But all the same, I couldn't see it was a suitable job for someone with a child.

Occasionally Ana Lyudmila's ex-husband helped out. Franklin Mott was in his '60's and had paid for Ana Lyudmila and a toddler Yvetta to come out from some part of the former Soviet republic and marry him. The marriage hadn't lasted, but he still turned up every Saturday and took Yvetta out, to her increasing displeasure from what I could gather. He seemed nice enough, but I thought there was something creepy about buying your partner from overseas.

At least mine had turned up here under his own steam. Well, kind of. But I wasn't about to send that Victor guy a thank-you or anything.

So I was never sure how much time Yvetta spent rattling around by herself in this place, or what she got up to when she was. And it probably didn't bear thinking about.

Amelia must have caught my expression. "God, Mum!" she said. "We're fourteen now, we're allowed to be here by ourselves!" Yeah, Amelia had been fourteen for two weeks; I didn't think it made that much of a difference.

"Yeah, OK. Fine" I muttered, thinking it wasn't fine at all really. I maybe wouldn't have minded so much if I'd just known they were going to be here alone.

Yes I would have, but at least I would have been prepared.

It took another ten minutes to get Amelia out the door, she dragged her feet, literally, and then remembered her jacket, remembered something important she had to tell Yvetta, remembered that she'd left her phone next to Yvetta's laptop and then finally, we could leave. I couldn't get out of the place fast enough; I don't know why she found it so appealing.

"I'm not a baby" Amelia grumbled, as we got in the car to go home. "And I'm not stupid, either."

"I know you're not" I said. I didn't add but I have no clue about Yvetta. She'd maybe have to make her own mind up about that. I snuck a glance at Amelia as we stopped at some lights. She was looking down at her phone and clearly ignoring me. A smile crept across her lips as she read whatever she was looking at, and then she realised I was watching, and quickly rearranged her face back into grumpy sullenness.

I sighed. I wished I'd know how much work teenagers were when she was three.

**A/N Rama Rama is pronounced Rah-mah rah-mah, pretty much how you'd expect, and Kumeu is Q-myu (that's the best I can describe it, anyway). They're both slightly rural areas outside of Auckland, but only just, so within the bounds of commuting distance depending on how much you love traffic.**

**If you don't really get netball, then try looking at this clip. It's very, very popular here and for a sport played entirely by women (men only play in social leagues) it gets a lot of publicity and prime-time coverage. Our team are the Silver Ferns, named after the NZ national emblem which appears on most of our sporting uniforms. **

**www (dot) youtube (dot) com /watch?v=8BADqwSU78M&NR=1**

**Thanks for reading!**


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N So a big, big thank-you to everyone for their response to the first chapter of this story. It makes me feel pretty special to see all the alerts and that people are listing it as a favourite after just one chapter. You guys rock. Unlike Darth Vadar. My daughter was pretty astounded the other day when she watched the first Star Wars movie with her dad and Darth Vadar did not say 'Well done' to the Stormtroopers who took Princess Leia's ship. So there's a kid who's been raised on a lot of positive reinforcement! And possibly too many Barbie movies.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Amelia remained pretty silent for the rest of the ride home. I figured that was her way of letting me know that she was kind of annoyed I hadn't just left her at Yvetta's place. Obviously it was so much cooler over there, especially because home came with a whole bunch of siblings.

Still, Amelia wasn't above letting her siblings know what she thought of them. "I don't think you're getting any better" she said to Felicia, who was still practicing her shooting. I had to hand it to Felicia; she was certainly trying to do her best to attain her desired position of Goal Attack. Sadly she stuck almost permanently on defence.

"Shut up" Felicia said, without turning around to look at Amelia. She found Amelia completely alien these days and certainly didn't share Amelia's disdain for the world. Sure, she wasn't exactly thrilled by anything outside of her own set of interests, but she wasn't quite as self-involved as Amelia.

Amelia ignored Felicia and shuffled off into the house, and I went to inspect the job they'd done on the fence. It looked OK, and Eric had obviously found the hammer, I just hoped it would hold. Bella, Amelia's cat, regarded me with a rather haughty superiority from the top of the fence. She was nowhere near as outright vicious as Pam's cat Stan was, but she didn't particularly deign to socialise with any of us either. Mostly she stayed outside and occasionally came in to re-bond with Amelia, before going back outside again. I wouldn't put it past her to have a whole other family lined up somewhere and she was just keeping us on the back-burner in case it didn't work out for her over there.

I trudged around the house and into the kitchen to find Eric and Sam had, at least, started making dinner. Eric had volunteered to do it, as there probably weren't too many more nights we could use the barbecue now that autumn was closing in on us and daylight savings had ended. I always hated when that happened, I was not a winter person.

"What are you making?" I asked, peering at what they were doing and hoping it wasn't anything too out of the ordinary. It wasn't that Eric was a great experimental cook, but since he'd tried to put green spaghetti on the menu rotation, the kids were suspicious if he attempted anything too out-there for them. Perhaps it was that I'd trained them to mainly like brown food after all the mince we ate, I wasn't sure, but the upshot was that you had to introduce stuff slowly.

"Things on sticks" Sam replied, threading something onto a skewer. Well that was OK, Eric had figured out that the kids would eat anything if it was on a stick, so he usually just made a selection of different kebabs, including some vegetable ones, and handed those out.

I walked over to where Eric was standing. "How'd you get the helper?" I asked him. Sam usually didn't mind helping me, but he wasn't normally the first to line up to help Eric with anything.

"Don't ask" Eric said. "Let's just say that he and Tray needed space and fewer tools around."

"OK…" I said. Yeah, I probably didn't want to know. "Where is Tray?"

"Outside. I put him in charge of watching that Ivan doesn't try to dig himself out again. Fuck, that dog is a nightmare." I didn't bother agreeing because Eric would conveniently forget that statement later on when Ivan wanted to come and worship at Eric's feet. He kind of lapped up the attention. They both did. It was a mutually beneficial relationship as far as I could see.

Felicia came in, carrying the ball. "Is dinner not ready?" she asked, looking kind of flabbergasted at that concept.

"No" I said. "But it's not far off." At least I assumed it wasn't.

"You take forever" Felicia grumped.

Amelia walked in. "I only want the vegetable ones" she announced. "I don't want to eat any defenceless animals."

"Cows aren't defenceless" Felicia argued. "Uncle Jase says you've got to watch them, or they'll break your foot, or your arm."

"I still don't want to eat them" Amelia said, sounding horrified.

"But you drink milk" Felicia said.

"That's different, that doesn't hurt them."

"Well of course it does! Why do you think they want to break Uncle Jases' arm, huh?" Felicia kind of had a point; I'd been tempted to hurt Jason for less.

"God, you know nothing" Amelia said, scathingly, as she drifted back down the hall.

"So?" Felicia said, "You're not that special, Ames!" she called out, but Amelia didn't reply, lost in a world in which she was the tragic heroine and we were all just secondary characters padding out the plot. I looked over at Eric, who was standing next to Sam again and helping him gather up all the completed kebabs to take out to the barbecue. I wondered what his version of it all was like, when he kind of told the story of everything in his head. I guessed he'd be the hero and I'd be the love interest, or something. Well that was kind of weird to contemplate.

I didn't get much time to dwell on that thought though because the hordes were gathering hoping to get fed. And it wasn't just the kids. Pam did appear. She was worried, I think, that Eric was doing something that didn't include her but she wasn't keen on getting too close to the barbecue so she watched Eric and Sam cook from a safe distance. For some reason I'd done such a great job of instilling a healthy respect for the oven into Pam she was still a bit fearful of anything that might be hot.

But the pets all started to arrive as well, their internal clocks and the smell of the barbecue alerting them to what time of day it was. Well, Bobby the bunny didn't, obviously, but that was because his new, improved, high-rise hutch was much harder to get out of. Ivan had chewed a hole in the original one, and thankfully not in Bobby himself. Instead, and unbeknownst to the rest of us, Bobby had been enjoying the freedom of having a ready-made exit and it wasn't until we found Stan trying to stalk him as he ate his way across the lawn that we realised what had happened.

So that meant I only had to feed Bella when she daintily tripped into the house and looked at me pointedly, and then Stan when he turned up, which set Bella off in a fit of growling when Stan got too close to her. I pushed Stan away, telling him to give Bella some space and he looked for a moment like he might growl at me, or worse, but decided to keep quiet. Possibly because I was still holding his dinner hostage.

I put Ivan's food in his bowl, but I could see him out through the bi-fold doors hanging out with Sam and Eric by the barbecue, and eating out of Eric's hand, literally. I wasn't sure why it was OK for Eric to feed Ivan half the stuff that was on the barbecue, but I used to get frowned on when I gave anything to Bob, but somehow that was the way it went.

There was, however, no sign yet of Edward. I wondered where he was, and if he was OK. Poor Eddie, he'd been well and truly thrown over in favour of Bobby by Felicia but his problems had started before then. In fact I suspected that his problems went back to his birth, he had the air of someone whose parents were far, far too closely related for comfort.

Eventually, just as I'd finished getting out the plates and cutlery for dinner, Eddie stuck his head in the door and took a long look around, checking that the coast was clear. He was terrified of Stan and wary of Bella, so he was usually the last to be fed. "Here you go, Eddie-Teddy" I said, putting his bowl down. Unfortunately by that stage he'd worked himself up to a nice pattern of winding around my legs, and he totally missed what I'd done. I picked him up and moved him over to the food and he was pleasantly surprised I'd fed him. He was a bit hopeless, but so grateful for any scraps of attention that it was hard not to be fond of him.

I still missed Bob though; he was kind of irreplaceable, although, obviously, we'd tried to fill the gap.

When dinner was ready, Eric and Sam brought the platters of kebabs into the kitchen, with Ivan hot on their heels and Pam trailing along behind. I was going to miss it when it wasn't barbecue season anymore, because it did make dinner a lot easier, especially at the weekends. And one of my easy lunch options was always sausages in bread with tomato sauce, although that one kind of confused Eric and there'd be a bit of muttering about 'why we couldn't just have ordinary hotdogs'. No amount of explaining that we weren't having hotdogs, we were having sausages in bread could mollify him.

Dinner went OK, apart from Amelia's grumpiness over the fact that there weren't enough of the vegetable kebabs. "Eat some of the chicken ones, then" Eric said. He obviously wasn't feeling particularly sympathetic.

"I can't" Amelia huffed. "I don't eat chicken."

"You do" Felicia argued. "I saw you and Yvetta eating chicken Subway the other week."

Amelia looked horrified. "No! That was all salad. You need your eyes tested."

"Yeah, you need your brain tested. You're not even a real vegetarian. You just pretend because you think it's cool."

"No I don't!" Amelia half-yelled. "It's mean to kill things, and eat them. How would you like it if people wanted to use you for food?"

"I think I'd be OK" Felicia said confidently. "I can run pretty fast. They'd have to catch me first." She thought for a moment. "They'd get Sam before me, anyway." She went back to eating.

It didn't even occur to me that it was highly unusual that Sam didn't respond to that taunt, but Eric looked at him sharply. He and Tray had been doing a good job of not letting on they were currently engaged in a battle involving sticking the ends of the wooden skewers into each other's legs. It was only if you watched closely, and saw the occasional flinching, that you figured out what was going on.

Now that Eric had noticed what was going on, though, they realised pretty quickly that the game was up. "Stop it" Eric said quietly, and hands and skewers appeared above the table and dinner carried on. I had to admit, the pair of them were quite tough. For all the damage they tried to inflict on each other, most of it was under the radar so they wouldn't attract Eric's attention. I was never sure if I was supposed to be proud of that, or not. Mostly I was proud of the fact it had rubbed off on Pam. When Jason had done anything to me, my main defence had been squealing and telling Mum. Pam was totally different and could withstand a lot of mistreatment from her brothers.

I wondered how many holes she had in her leg now.

EPOV

I was going to miss it when we couldn't use the barbecue anymore. Somehow the appeal of cooking on the deck wore off pretty fucking rapidly when it rained every day through winter. Sure, I could probably have made Sam stand on the deck and supervise it, but Sookie always got a bit worried when the kids were around hot things and would have just fretted he was going to set himself on fire or something. Fuck knows she'd done such a good job on Pam she almost wouldn't come within ten feet of the barbecue these days.

But even though it wasn't pouring with rain, I'd still roped Sam into helping me, just to keep him away from Tray for a bit so no one ended up permanently maimed. Granted, they hadn't managed to really hurt each other yet, but one day it was going to happen, and when it did, I really hoped that I was somewhere else and couldn't be blamed for it. For one thing, I could bet I was going to get the lecture about cutting the sharp bits off the wooden skewers in future. I hadn't bothered, because we were past the stage of having kids who might accidentally stab themselves. Stabbing someone else, completely not accidentally, was another matter altogether.

As much as I loved the kids, I'd be the first to admit they could be little shits at times. Sunday afternoons were usually the worst, you kept them cooped up together for too long and tensions bubbled to the surface and the next thing you knew you were having to separate them and find suitable activities to keep them from thinking too much about exacting revenge on a sibling. Tonight had been a case in point when I'd had to tell Sam he was helping me make dinner. He hadn't been thrilled about that news, but he'd been gunning for Tray ever since Tray had shown us the fix on the pantry shelf. I didn't think it was the fact that Tray had fixed the shelf that had upset Sam, it was that Tray and Sookie had done it together. He never had been that happy with sharing Sookie, but he didn't have a fucking choice, so he'd have to learn to deal with it. Without violence. Because, fuck knows, the rest of us had to.

SPOV

After dinner, of course, the trick was to get everyone in to bed. And then get Eric to sit down for Schedule Night. I was never sure what was worse, the kids could come up with a whole range of time-wasting excuses, but Eric had a few years on them and had actually created a job for himself where he spent most of his time telling people complete twaddle.

I'd thought that while I cleaned up the kitchen, Eric was supervising everyone, but when I found Eric he was in Pam's room and she was giggling at him because she'd made him wear her new headband. It had a large plastic bow on the top, like the ones Minnie Mouse wore, and the bow had flashing lights inside it. It was horrific, but had been Pam's choice from the $2 Shop when she'd earned her last treat from the sticker chart.

"Are you guys heading for the shower soon?" I asked.

Eric shrugged, Pam giggled and neither of them gave me much of an answer. I left them to it.

I had a bit more success persuading Amelia and Felicia that they had to get ready for bed, although Amelia started muttering about homework, as it's always a good idea to leave that until 7 o'clock on a Sunday night. I managed to resist the urge to lecture her, and just told her to get it done instead. I was trying to let her make her own mistakes, and if she got detention for not turning something in, well, it was probably a good lesson to learn. But I couldn't help but worry that spending all this time with Yvetta really wasn't going to help her get good marks this year.

Felicia was a bit easier, although getting her to take her earbuds out long enough to actually listen to any instructions is always difficult. She was fond of the "Yeah, yeah, I'll do it" school of just telling me whatever to get rid of me.

I walked back to the kitchen to try to sort out everyone's lunches for the next day. It wasn't easy because we were down on a few basics and I needed to go shopping. I did at least have bread in the freezer, but finding things to put in the bread was a bit of a chore, and it wasn't like there were a lot of leftovers from dinner going spare.

I was just finishing up when Pam appeared in her nightie. "You need to come and tuck me in" she said, forlornly.

"Oh, OK" I agreed. "What happened to Daddy?"

"He's with Tray and Sam" she said, making it sound like Eric had defected somewhere. I guess in her mind he had. Still, at least the boys were getting showers I figured.

So I followed Pam to her room, and stood waiting while she began the careful re-arrangement of the many toys and pillows that littered her bed. It was a complicated business and took a while, and I could never figure out how there was still room for Pam in the bed when everything else was in there too.

"Are you sorted?" I asked her, when she'd finally jammed herself in there.

"Um…" Pam looked around. "I don't have any water" she said, and I had to take her cup, refill it in the kitchen, and bring it back.

"All set?" I tried.

"Oh, um…" Pam looked thoughtful again. "Do I get a story?"

"Oh. I thought you guys had done that."

"No" Pam said. "Definitely not." She wiggled her way out of bed and stood for a while at the bookcase choosing her story. I tried very hard not to rush her.

Eventually she settled on _Zog_, about a dragon that's not very good at being a dragon, and a princess who doesn't want to be anyone's but wants to be a doctor instead. When that was done, I kissed Pam goodnight and left her room.

Felicia came wandering slowly out of the bathroom, which was odd, because the boys should have been next in there and I'd left Eric in charge of that one. But of course, I realised, it's Sunday.

I found the three of them in the family room watching _Top Gear_. "It's schedule night" I said to Eric, and he possibly grunted in response, but his eyes didn't move from the screen. I gave up and sat down with them. I didn't get this show, well, maybe the bits where they did something, but not so much the bits that where they just rambled on about whatever incredibly expensive car they'd been driving around a track.

After a while of watching, I thought maybe I'd try and contribute something. "You know what car I like?" I said, and they all stopped talking amongst themselves and looked at me. "I like the Mini Coopers."

Sam looked thoughtful. "But we wouldn't all fit in one of those" he said, slowly. "You know, with you."

"Yep" I agreed. "You wouldn't." It sounded brilliant. It wasn't that I really hated driving my big people mover around, but it was sometimes difficult to manoeuvre, and usually full of a lot of other people's crap. And sometimes it had a doggy smell if I'd been carting Ivan around as well. Those tiny little Minis always seemed pristine and shiny, and completely devoid of missing homework, old sandwich crusts, left socks and tennis balls.

Sam gave me a funny look, like maybe I was losing the plot. Eric gave me an even funnier look, like he thought I was actually going to drive to a Mini dealership and trade in a people mover, five kids and the dog. Tray just watched the TV and absentmindedly poked Sam in the side. "Minis don't go that fast, Mum" Tray said in the end. "You should pick something better." Yeah, I think he'd missed what criteria I was actually using to pick a car.

When the show was finished Eric took the boys off to get ready for bed. "I'll meet you in the kitchen" I said, as he walked out of the family room. I think I got an affirmative response. Possibly the noise he made was meant to alert me to the fact that he'd just that minute remembered he had fourteen important presentations to complete before morning. Still, I knew that if I hung out in the kitchen long enough, eventually he'd turn up, if only to make some coffee.

And sure enough, he did. I was giving the top of the oven a nice going over with the stuff that was supposed to protect the surface as Eric walked in. "Sometimes" he announced, "it would be easy to think that you liked that oven more than you liked some of the kids."

"Well, it's more useful than most of the kids" I pointed out. "And it doesn't talk back." I did like my nice Swedish oven.

Eric sighed, and walked over to the coffeemaker. "We didn't even use it tonight" he grumbled.

"Yeah, I know. But I'm getting a start on the chores for the week, given that I have to work tomorrow." We'd recently been offered a new space in a hall in Epsom, and I'd set up Monday classes in addition to the ones I was already running Tuesdays to Thursdays. It made life quite busy at the moment, but I'd hired a new girl called India and I was hopeful that she could take over the Mondays by herself in the near future, but, in the meantime, I had to be there too.

Eric sighed. "So there's no point asking what you're baking tomorrow, then?" Yeah, he missed the Monday baking sessions, after so many years of it being the routine; he was kind of conditioned to it now. And it made sense to make stuff to fill up the lunches at the beginning of the week, because, God knows, some of my kids could eat. Of course these days I only had Pam to bake with and we got a lot of cupcakes with multi-coloured icing.

"No" I agreed. "Although I have to do something later in the week. Sam's class is doing a lunchtime bake sale to raise money for…oh, God. Children with cancer, I think? Anyway, I've been instructed to make chocolate crunch for that."

"Well that sounds alright" Eric said, and I figured I was making a double batch. "Because it would be a shame" he continued "for you to lavish all that love and attention on the fucking oven and nothing to actually come from it."

I was tempted to point out that it was the source of most of the meals he got around here, but instead I just waved my hand at the coffeemaker and said "You just busy yourself with your Italian mistress over there, and stop being jealous of the stove."

Eric just made a sort of phfft noise and it wasn't until I stood up and really looked at the coffeemaker that something occurred to me. Eric had recently upgraded it and the new one took up a huge amount of my valuable bench space for something that only made coffee. It was red and shiny with lots of chrome bits all over it and Eric really hated the inevitable sticky fingerprints it ended up with from time to time.

"Eric" I said, and he managed to tear himself away from the coffeemaker to look at me. "Are you having a midlife crisis with a coffeemaker?"

"What?" Eric asked, looking confused.

"The coffeemaker. The new one. It's just…well, it looks like the car they just had on TV, the flash one they were driving around in…like kind of sporty and stuff…" I trailed off because, not for the first time tonight, Eric was looking at me like I was seriously unhinged. Maybe cars were not my specialist subject, but he knew what I was getting at.

Eric, however, was hell-bent on pretending he didn't know so he carried on with making coffee. He got out our cups. "I guess we have to keep using these, don't we?" he asked, as he put them on the bench.

They'd been a Christmas present from Felicia and Amelia, who, in the spirit of Christmas, had decided to buy presents together. Or maybe they were just cheap. At any rate, when I'd seen them in the gift shop at St Luke's I'd wondered who on earth would buy them, and would never have guessed my own children.

The two mugs had been nicely boxed up and obviously intended to be given as a gift. One was a dark pink and said 'Desperate Housewife' in white script on the side. I was kind of worried what the girls thought of me.

The other mug was dark blue and said 'Grumpy Old Man' in the same script. At least one of the mugs was correct.

"I guess we do" I agreed. "Or they'll catch us and think we don't like them." They'd been pleased as punch at their choice, because, as Amelia had said "You guys drink all that coffee, so of course you need nice mugs." I had smiled, and nodded, in what I hoped was the appropriately grateful way. I'd thought some of the handmade gifts had been bad. Or the random things from the $2 shop, like the time Sam and Tray bought me a pack of spectacularly ugly scrunchies, made from some kind of metallic fabric, and I was forced to spend a week wearing a shiny purple and green monstrosity in my hair. Somehow these were worse.

Eric looked down at his mug. "I don't think I'm that grumpy" he said.

"Really, it depends on your time of the month" I told him, taking my cup of coffee and putting it on the table. I grabbed the calendar off the wall, and my diary and looked pointedly at Eric.

He sat down with his cup and pulled his phone out of his pocket. "No, I'm pretty sure that's you" he said.

"Nope" I said. "I can always tell when you're doing that monthly report thing with Clancy and Indira because your fuse gets even shorter." Eric looked at me, disbelievingly, like it was impossible he could ever be bad-tempered. Mmm.

Just then Felicia wandered in. "I came to say goodnight" she said, drifting over to where we were sitting. I was glad we were using the approved cups at least.

"Well you're just in time" Eric said. "To tell your mother that I don't get grumpy."

Felicia frowned. "When?" she asked, her eyes shifting to me. I got the feeling she thought this was some kind of trick question.

"Well…" Eric tried to think of a way to phrase it. "When I'm dealing with the guys I work with. In the States."

"Oh" Felicia said, realisation dawning. "Yeah, you're shitty with Clancy all the time, then you just yell a lot." She shrugged. "But we're used to it, and there's a mug and everything." She pointed to the cup Eric was holding to his lips. "OK" she said, coming over to hug me. "'Night".

"'Night, Felicia" I said, and Eric mumbled "'Night, Leesh" when she hugged him. He watched her disappear out of the kitchen.

"Next time you need someone to back your version of events up" I suggested. "Try Pam. It's all still rainbows in her little world. At least until next month, when she starts school." Yeah, Eric didn't like that thought. He didn't say anything, he just huffed and started looking at his phone with great intent, but I could tell he was trying to imagine a world in which he wasn't the centre of Pam's universe, and really not liking it at all.

We worked through the usual stuff for the week, and sorted out who was going where and when. There was a lot of stuff to fit in. Felicia's netball was starting up again on Thursday and of course Wednesday I was at the gym…except when I looked, I wasn't.

"Oh poo" I said. "Quinn moved my training to tomorrow night. He's doing the photos for that book on Wednesday."

Eric sighed loudly. "Does he even have a first name?" he asked me.

"Umm…Ioane, I think?" He never used it, and I hadn't really realised for a while that Quinn wasn't, in fact, his first name.

"Seems terribly pretentious" Eric said. "I think he's just trying to impress you."

"Yeah, I don't think you need to worry about Quinn, Eric. I can't see his family being thrilled if he brought home the palagi woman with the five kids and the really pissed off ex-husband."

Eric was quiet for a minute. "So…the ex-husband is me?" he asked in the end.

"Well…yeah. I mean, I can't see you going quietly into the night" I said. Not that it would ever happen, but sometimes I wondered what went through Eric's head to make him so grumpy about Quinn.

"OK" Eric said. "Because I was having trouble figuring out how the fuck you brought Bill back from the dead."

"Yeah, right" I snorted. "That would be super-awesome. All three of you fighting over me."

"Oh no. I wouldn't fucking fight over you. I'd leave that to them."

"Oh. You would?" I knew this was hypothetical, but that wasn't the hypothetical response I'd expected.

Eric smiled, obviously thrilled with what he'd come up with. "No. I'd fight _for_ you, but not over you. I'm not beating the shit out of someone else just to prove you should pick me. That's just a fucking waste of time. If you don't know it by now, there's no point."

"Um…new rule, I don't want to know what goes on in your head. It's too scary" I said, patting Eric's arm. Eric just shrugged. "It does leave me with the problem, though" I continued, "that I don't have time to go shopping tomorrow. It's a pain in the bum working Mondays. I was going to still go in the afternoon, but I won't have time if I'm going to the gym."

"Oh" Eric said, and he glanced at the pantry as if trying to work out how long before we ran out of provisions. At the rate everyone here ate, I predicted we had about two days and then it would turn into our own mini-version of _Survivor_. God, I hoped they voted me off the island first.

"Um…I could go" Eric said.

"Really?" I asked.

"Well, yeah. I mean, how fucking hard can it be? It's just groceries."

"Thanks. It's no wonder they think I'm desperate" I said, holding up my cup.

"What? Oh. I didn't mean it like that" Eric said, dismissively. "I just meant…well, I'm sure I can do it."

"You want to go to Pak N Save?"

"No. I want to go to a decent supermarket, Sookie" Eric said.

"Well, you can't go to Nosh" I warned him. "They only do nice food, not actual groceries. The useful stuff we need. Like toilet paper." I had visions of the crisis that could cause and it wasn't pretty.

Eric sighed. "Well I can go to Countdown then" he said.

"OK. But you have to take Pam, or else she'll be upset. She likes shopping."

"She does?" Eric asked.

"Yep, she likes to be in charge of the list. And we're working on her maths."

"Do you make her find the specials for you?" Eric asked.

"Um…she's pretty good at it" I admitted. She seemed to like it. Shopping was the thing Pam and I had always done without the big kids. I was going to miss her when she went to school.

EPOV

Schedule night was a chore, but it had to be done or else no one ever knew what the fuck they were doing. Things ran a lot better when kids didn't get left places for a start because we both thought the other parent was picking them up. Thank fuck that had only happened once. Or twice, maybe. But, mostly, schedule night fixed that problem.

My most pressing problem was that I wanted to have sex with Sookie. We'd actually slept in this morning, during the time we told the kids we were sleeping in because it was Sunday. The extra sleep had been nice, but now I felt like I'd missed out somewhere. I was hopeful that offering to go grocery shopping for Sookie would go some way to making her think favourably of that suggestion, when I made it, despite the fact she thought I'd made a crack about it not being that difficult. I was pretty sure it wasn't. In fact I was pretty sure if I just gave Pam the credit card, she could do it on her own, but I wasn't going to argue the point with Sookie.

I still wanted sex.

But just before I could suggest we go to bed, Amelia came slouching into the kitchen looking morose, as usual. She was a fucking nightmare at the moment, either she ignored you, or, if you'd been deemed to say the wrong thing, she yelled at you. Most of the other kids weren't sure what to do with her, and, I had to admit, I was fucking perplexed by it all too. Sookie kept saying it was hormones and just a part of her growing up, but I wasn't sure. I kind of thought some of it might be Amelia.

"Are you off to bed?" Sookie asked Amelia.

"Yeah…" she said, languidly.

"Have you finished everything you needed to do?" Sookie asked her.

Amelia's mood changed from languid to annoyed in the blink of an eye. "Yes!" she huffed. "I _said_ I was doing it."

"I was only asking" Sookie said.

"But you always _only _ask. And I'm not a baby!" For someone who had made that her mantra, she wasn't above throwing the odd tantrum. And some of hers were even worse than the ones Pam had had as a toddler. And Pam was pretty legendary, both in our house and beyond it. Kennedy still talked about the infamous afternoon Pam had spent twenty minutes screaming from the playhouse when I tried to get her to come inside.

"I know you're not" Sookie said, ploughing on where the better idea would have been to shut up and wait for her to leave. Maybe that was just me still wanting to have sex, but I couldn't see the point in getting into another argument with Amelia. My plan was to lie low, keep out of it, and wait until she left for college. "But I'm allowed to ask you sometimes. I'm still your mother."

Amelia bristled at that remark. Yeah, for someone who'd actually had a mother around all her life she didn't quite realise how shitty the alternative was. All she saw was Sookie trying to hold her back. I figured it was hard to appreciate what you'd always had, but, fuck, I wanted to tell her that she was fucking lucky and should shut up and be grateful.

But I didn't. Because me joining the fray wasn't going to serve any purpose. And I still wanted sex.

"But you're not my prison warden!" Amelia said loudly. "God! You have no clue. You're so old!" And then she turned and stomped out.

Sookie sat there biting her lip. "I'm not that old" she muttered.

"No, you're not" I agreed. Maybe there was still a chance of sex if I played my cards right.

"I might go and say goodnight to Amelia" Sookie said, and she walked out of the room. I took the cups we'd used and carried them to the dishwasher. I had no idea why Amelia and Felicia had thought they'd make good presents, but Sookie felt we had to keep using them to show the girls we appreciated the thought. I wasn't sure that I appreciated being called grumpy. Mostly I was grumpy because I wasn't having sex.

I hoped Sookie wasn't going to be with Amelia for too long.

I took Ivan out to the backyard for his last bathroom trip before bedtime. It took him a while, by the time he checked out all the interesting smells that had appeared since the last time he'd been out there. Telling him to hurry up though didn't work any better than it did with the kids, so there was nothing I could do but wait.

When he was finally done, we went back inside and I checked the house was locked up. Sookie wasn't in the kitchen though. I hoped she'd be in our bedroom already, but she wasn't there either. I took off my shoes and sat on the bed, waited for a bit, picked up my book, read a few pages, wondered where Sookie was, wondered if there'd be sex, and then, finally, Sookie came into the room.

"I think she's OK" she said, as she came in and kicked her shoes off under the bed. She was just lucky that Ivan didn't chew shoes quite as frequently these days because when he'd been a puppy, she'd lost a few pairs. I had pretended to commiserate with her, but fuck, shoes don't belong under a bed and that was a perfect illustration of why they didn't.

"She's definitely OK" I said. "She's just…a teenager." I wasn't sure what else to say. I had no clue what to do about Amelia. She was the first teenage girl I'd ever fucking had to be responsible for. It was kind of shitty and scary and I really hoped it would all be over soon.

Sookie sat down on the bed and sighed. "I just don't remember it being this bad when I was a teenager. I don't know. Maybe Amelia's different? Or maybe it's different when you're the parent? I just wish I could ask my mum about it." She stared at the bedcovers and looked fucking miserable. So maybe there wouldn't be sex then. Fuck.

"Um…I think it's Amelia" I tried. "I mean…she's different to you, isn't she?"

"Yeah…I guess. I didn't have her confidence" Sookie said, sadly.

"So, probably we have to figure this out ourselves."

"Or wait until she hits 18 and it all goes away."

"That's a fucking good plan" I agreed. Sookie scooted up the bed and lay with her head on my chest. "No one tells you it's going to be this hard" she complained. "And that you're going to have to face the fact one day that your kid thinks you're a dinosaur and you don't know anything. She used to think I was cool. Because I could paint her toenails without getting any on her actual toes. That's where it all went wrong. When she learned to paint her own toenails."

"Um…OK" I agreed. Sookie was wandering rapidly into rambling territory but it was better to just let her get on with it. I maybe couldn't paint toenails, but I had learned that offering advice when Sookie was in this kind of mood was a short-cut to a lot of huffing and being told I was wrong. And no sex.

And there might be sex. We'd actually made it as far as the bed. Together. That was a fucking good start.

I thought we might need to progress things a bit though, so I put my hand under Sookie's chin and tilted her face up so I could kiss her. That was nice. And Sookie always seemed to like it when I kissed her. Also, it stopped the conversation about what to do with Amelia, or where Sookie might have gone wrong with Amelia, or whatever the fuck we were talking about. I wasn't really thinking about any of that now.

Hopefully Sookie had stopped thinking about it too. I slid down the bed a bit and held Sookie against me. The kissing seemed to be working, so I was tempted to try something else. I reached a hand inside Sookie's shirt and held her boob. Yeah, that was good. I was tracing the line of the lace on her bra with my finger and contemplating pulling the cup down when Sookie pulled back.

"Eric" she said. "Are you trying to have sex me with me?"

"Um…" I said. "I thought I was succeeding, actually."

"You always think I'm such a sure thing!" she accused. She was smiling though. She did always like to tease me.

"I did make you dinner" I pointed out.

Sookie pretended to think about that, tapping her chin with one finger. "OK" she said in the end. "I guess you have a point."

"I have several" I said, leaning over her.

"Go on" Sookie challenged. "Show me."

I do so fucking love a challenge.

**_Zog_ is by Julia Donaldson. It's a fun read, and I'm particularly fond of the bit where the dragon and the knight both declare 'mine' over Princess Pearl and she tells them not to be so stupid and goes off to be a doctor.**

**Ioane (Ee-oh-neigh, or thereabouts). The Samoan version of John.**

**Palagi (Par-lang-ee) is the Samoan word for Europeans. **

**Thanks for reading! **


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N Yay! Look at that, I'm back already. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I had meant to be really, really organised. But then I always mean to be organised. Mostly I think I am organised, but everyone else here keeps throwing me off course.

So I'd thought that when I got up on Monday morning I would take the time to carefully re-write my shopping list, arrange it into sections, weed out the stuff Eric wouldn't cope with and then give it to him.

But of course it was a Monday morning, and somehow they're the worst. The kids have had two days off school and consequently forgotten completely how routines and getting ready work. In fact Tray seemed totally confused when I yelled at him because he was still wandering around eating Weetbix in his pyjamas when the walking bus was nearly due to arrive here. "Walking bus?" he asked, with the air of someone for who this was a totally new concept.

"Yeah, you know" I said. "Where other parents come and take you to school. You remember school?" Tray gave me a look, and shuffled off. I hoped he was going to get ready and not just to commiserate with his siblings that Mum is an idiot.

Sam came wandering into the kitchen. At least he was dressed. It was probably too much to ask that he would have brushed his hair, but I was hoping that maybe teeth had been addressed. However, Sam apparently had other problems. "Where's that book?" he asked.

"What book?" I replied.

"Um…the one I need. I had it…the other day…" Sam didn't seem sure. I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked around kind of helplessly. "Was it in the kitchen?" I asked.

Sam shrugged. "Dunno." He just kept looking at me like I was going to magically make it appear from somewhere.

Felicia breezed past on her way to the laundry. After a moment she yelled "Mum. Mum! Are my sneakers in here?"

"Can you see them?" I yelled back.

"No. That's the problem" she called to me. "I thought you cleaned them."

"I didn't know they needed cleaning" I called back, and Felicia appeared again, gave me an annoyed look, and stomped off. I turned back to Sam.

"I don't know where it is" I said. "Did you actually read it over the weekend?"

Sam looked thoughtful. "No" he said, brightly. "Must still be in my bag." He left the kitchen before I had time to ask if he was supposed to have read the book.

Amelia came in, didn't make eye contact, picked up her bag, and drifted out again. I took a deep breath and reminded myself I was turning a blind eye to some things, like the fact she was clearly wearing bracelets and shoes that were likely to get her in trouble for not being part of her uniform. Her choice, I reminded myself. A detention wouldn't hurt her.

Uniforms were also on Pam's mind. "When I go to school" she said, as she walked into the kitchen. "I'm getting a new uniform, right? Not Tray's uniform, because I don't want a boy's uniform."

"Well..." I said. "The jumpers are the same; I might have a jumper you could have." The boys were pretty rough with clothing, but I was pretty sure I'd replaced jumpers in the past and there might be something that wasn't too bad.

"I don't have to wear shorts though? Like the boys?" Pam asked, worriedly.

"No. No, we have skirts, because Felicia's skirt will still be around here." It would have been Amelia's first, but they were pretty hardy things.

Pam sighed. "Because Izzy said that her mummy is going to take her shopping for a uniform. So can we do that?" She looked at me hopefully. I had a brief nostalgia trip, remembering the trip to buy a uniform for the daughter who now thought I was lower than dog poo, and then I tried to figure out a way to break Pam's heart.

"Well" I said, "It will be like shopping…only at home. We'll get Daddy to get the storage box down from the roof and go through it to see what fits." I hoped I'd sold it.

I hadn't. "Daddy doesn't like the roof" Pam said. "And…that's not really shopping. That's just…getting stuff from the roof." She looked despondent. I figured I would try and cheer her up. "But you and Daddy are doing the grocery shopping this afternoon" I told her.

Pam frowned. "Really?" she asked. "Does Daddy know?"

"Yeah" I said.

"Does he know where to go?" she asked.

"Yep."

"Does he know about the list? You'll have to give him the list? Does he know I get to hold the list?"

"Yeah, probably" I said. After all, Eric was the one who kept going 'how hard can it be'.

"Maybe I should tell him" Pam mused.

"Well, tell him this afternoon. After he picks you up"

"I'll tell him how to get there. Because I know" Pam said, smiling broadly at the thought of all that time with Eric in a situation where she was nominally in charge, at least in her version of it.

"You tell him that" I said.

"OK" Pam said, her eyes shining. I passed her her backpack and she struggled into it. "OK, go and wait by the door for everyone else" I told her and she headed off.

Eric walked in and put his coffee cup in the dishwasher. "Did you see if Tray was dressed yet?" I asked him

"Tray?" Eric asked, sounding as vague about the existence of Tray as Tray had seemed about the walking bus and school.

"Yeah, you know. Kid. Looks like you. Doesn't believe in the walking bus."

Eric frowned. "Yeah, I know who you mean, Sookie. I just don't fucking know if he's dressed or not." Eric just stood there glaring at me.

"Could you please go and check?" I asked. "Only I hate being the mother who has to continually apologise to the other people on the walking bus because my kids are the ones holding everyone else up."

Eric rolled his eyes and walked off, yelling "Tray! Are you ready yet?" Tray yelled something back, but I didn't catch it.

I remembered the list and started to re-write it, but then Eric came back into the kitchen. "OK, Tray's good to go and the girls are ready so I'm leaving" he said.

"Um…OK, just hang on…" I said, while Eric looked at me impatiently.

"Dad!" Felicia called. "Da-ad! I've got practice!" Yeah, crap. Before school netball practice, that was what I'd forgotten.

"OK, well here's the list" I said shoving the piece of paper at Eric. "Um, just check you can understand it…"

Eric gave it a cursory glance. "It'll be fine, Sookie" he said. "I mean, it's just stuff we normally have, isn't it."

"Yeah" I said. "Well Pam'll know." Eric looked like the idea of taking direction from the nearly five year old was just pure silliness.

"So, um. Good luck" I said. "And, you know, if anything gets missed, it'll be OK. I'll sort it tomorrow. Just milk. We really need milk. And toilet paper. Maybe some bananas for lunches tomorrow. Tray needs socks. Otherwise we can probably miss out the rest without too much drama…"

Eric wasn't really looking at me, he turned his head in the direction of the hallway and called out "I'll be there in a minute." Then he turned back to me. "It'll be OK" he said. "I have fucking been to a supermarket before." Well, he had, but I wasn't sure when he'd last done a large shop for seven people.

He bent down to kiss me goodbye, and walked off down the hall. I could hear him telling Felicia to leave Sam alone and then there was a chorus of goodbyes from the three girls and most of the family was gone.

Tray came back into the kitchen, and I realised that Eric's idea of being ready and mine were completely different. "Tray" I said to him, and he stopped investigating his lunchbox to look at me. "You're going to need shoes."

EPOV

Sookie had been a bit of a pain in the ass about the groceries. Every time she brought it up, she'd give me this look, like she really didn't think I could handle it. It was putting groceries in a shopping cart, and handing over a credit card. I didn't think I had to be a fucking member of MENSA to be able to handle that little task.

But Sookie's attitude seemed to have rubbed off on Pam. "We're going shopping, because it's shopping day!" Pam sing-songed from the back seat after I collected her from pre-school.

"Yep. We are" I agreed, as I checked that I had Sookie's precious list in my jacket pocket. I probably could have figured out what we needed, but thankfully it was there. I guess it gave Pam something to do if she normally held it.

After a few moments though Pam said "Daddy? This isn't the way."

"Way where?"

"To the shops. We don't go _this_ way. Because we have to go to Pak N Save."

"We're not going to Pak N Save" I said.

"Yeah…Mum knows though, doesn't she? I mean you asked her? Because we won't get the same specials if we don't go there."

"Yes, Pam. Your mom knows."

"OK." Pam shut up about the supermarket after that and went back to talking about school. Fuck, I didn't think she was old enough for school. She was supposed to be the baby, and yet, when I thought about it, she hadn't been the baby for a while now. She'd been busy either trying to keep up with her brothers, or copy her older sisters. Her actual babyhood had been brief, and I felt like I'd missed it. Fuck, that was all just depressing.

We pulled into the parking lot at the supermarket and I had my first success when I managed to get one of the spaces right outside the entrance. The ones for parents. Only not everyone agreed that it was a success. "Daddy" Pam hissed. "You can't park here."

"Yeah, I can" I said, checking I had the list again. "It's for people with kids. I have you." It wasn't the best reason for taking your kids shopping, but there had to be some perks.

"It's for _babies_" Pam said, undoing her seatbelt. I got out of the car and opened Pam's door and she climbed out, and then pointed to the parents parking sign. "Look, there's a _pram_ on the picture! I don't go in a pram. Like a baby." She then looked around. "Someone might see us!" she said, looking worried.

"And do what, Pam?" I asked. I really didn't think these things were policed.

Pam shrugged. "I don't know. But it's not right, because I'm not a baby." I wondered if she'd been taking lessons from Amelia and had a nasty thought. Did I really only have ten more years before Pam turned into the same kind of pain in the ass Amelia was at times? Fuck.

"No" I agreed, patting Pam on the head. "You're not." We walked over to where the shopping carts were stowed and I pulled one out and checked that its wheels weren't too misaligned. "OK, do you want to sit in the cart?" I asked Pam.

Pam looked like she might explode. "I'm NOT a baby!" she said, clenching her fists.

"Well I was just asking" I said. She could be a touchy little thing at times. Thank fuck the tantrums she used to have had gone away, but she'd still yell randomly at times. I don't know where the temper came from, maybe from Sookie. It was hard to tell.

I pushed the cart into the supermarket and Pam walked alongside me. "Do you have the list?" Pam asked, as we went through the bars at the entrance and were immediately assaulted by the stacks of things they wanted us to buy before we'd even thought about what we needed. Yeah, we weren't getting any of that shit.

I could see Pam's eyes look longingly towards a display of some kind of potato chips, and I figured I needed to distract her. "OK" I said. "Let's check out this list."

"I get to hold it" Pam said.

"Yeah…but I need to read it…so maybe I'll hold it for now."

"But Mum lets me hold it!" Pam complained. "It's my job."

"It's different for her. She wrote it. She can understand it." This was my first real look at the list. It wasn't as clear as I'd hoped it would be. It had obviously started off as a list of things, written one underneath the other, but along the way Sookie had added some insertions, notations, and possibly a diagram of…fuck, I didn't know. Maybe she'd just been doodling while on the phone.

Pam was looking distressed, so I figured we'd better press on. "Let's start with the fresh stuff, because that's right over there" I said to Pam. "You can get the things we need. First up…uh…bananas." I could see that one.

Pam skipped off and came back holding a bunch of bananas, and put them in the cart. "They're a bit green" I commented.

"They'll ripen" Pam said. "Mum says you don't get any that are too ripe, because then they end up black and no one eats them, so she ends up having to bake something with them. And eventually everyone gets bored of banana cake and banana muffins."

OK. That was obviously a speech Sookie had given few times then. It was uncanny how Pam sounded like her when she was parroting what Sookie had said. I shrugged; I wasn't going to argue over bananas for fuck's sake. Not when they were the only thing we actually had in the cart.

I was kind of bored of this already.

"Um…" I said, looking down the list and trying to figure out what other fresh stuff we needed. "Celery."

Pam skipped off, and brought it back, and then did the same with tomatoes. It was probably a miscalculation sending her off for the potatoes by herself, but I hadn't realised how big the bags were. She made a good effort at dragging it back to the cart, but I did have to help her get it in.

"OK…um…" Fuck, this one stumped me. "Courgettes…" I said slowly. That was one of those weird New Zealand vegetables I thought. Like kumara, which was really just a sweet potato, except they didn't make any pies out of it. Fucking odd.

Pam had run off though, and was back in a minute holding a bag of something that didn't look right. "I think they're zucchinis" I said to her.

"No" Pam said, loading them in the cart. "They're courgettes."

"Are you sure?" I asked her. "Where's the sign?" Pam sighed and pointed to where she'd got them from, and sure enough it did say courgettes. I looked around and couldn't see any zucchinis, so it was unlikely she'd been mixed up, which was a fucking good thing, because I didn't really like zucchini. Courgette was OK though, even if it was from the same family.

"OK, that's it for fruit and vegetables" I said, looking at the list again. Unless there was a vegetable that was denoted by three dots and the numbers two, eight and nine, we were good. I pushed the cart away, but Pam stayed put. "We haven't looked at the specials" she said.

Oh for fuck's sake, it was worse than actually shopping with Sookie. "Capsicums are on sale" Pam announced. "See? They have a yellow sign. The yellow signs are the specials."

I looked at the capsicums. At least I knew that they were really peppers, but somehow needed a more complicated name here. I shrugged, it wasn't on the list, but…Sookie liked specials.

"Fine" I said. "Throw some in." Pam grabbed a plastic bag and selected a couple of red ones, and one green one and put those in, looking pleased with her achievements. I was just wondering how many more fucking aisles we had to go. This had to be the most boring place in the entire universe. Even the staff looked bored, there was a guy standing there stacking lettuces who looked like he'd give his right arm to be anywhere else.

"This is fun, isn't it Daddy?" Pam said, beaming at me.

"Um…yeah" I said, hoping I sounded convincing. I didn't want to give her a complex about the time we spent together, but fuck, next time we'd go somewhere better. Perhaps I'd even take her to that horrible Smiggle store with all the stationery and watch her spend half an hour to pick one pencil sharpener. Anywhere had to be better than here.

"Next" Pam announced. "We do juice."

"That's not on the list" I said. I double-checked, and it wasn't.

"Yeah, but sometimes we get it" Pam said.

"No. Don't need it. We have a perfectly good tap that brings water right into the kitchen. It's one of the miracles of modern plumbing." Pam didn't say anything to that, she just crossed her arms and huffed at me.

We finally made it to another aisle. Cereal. Fuck. I looked at the list. I think Sookie had written Weetbix. "Weetbix" I said to Pam, and she stomped off to where it was on the shelf. I pushed the cart and caught up to her, but she was standing there. "I don't know which one to get" she said to me.

"The Weetbix" I said, pointing.

"I know that!" she said, "But I don't know what _size_."

"The big box. Probably two of the big boxes, actually." Sam and Tray could put a fair amount of the stuff away, despite the fact it resembled nothing more than flaky cardboard.

"Yeah…but you have to work out which one costs less" Pam said.

"Well, the small one" I said. "But we need the big one."

"No, not like that" Pam said, "Like, sometimes we get two of these" she pointed to the middle sized boxes, "Because that's cheaper than getting one of these", she pointed to the large box. She looked at me expectantly.

Fuck. We had to work out cost per volume on every fucking thing? No wonder this took so long. I peered at the prices listed on the shelving units. "I think the big box is still the cheapest per volume" I said to Pam. There didn't appear to be any specials.

"What's vol-oom?" Pam asked.

And this is how it turned into a maths lesson, I guessed. I looked at my watch. It felt like we'd been here for an hour, but it was only about fifteen minutes. Still we were only in the second fucking aisle. Shit, we were going to be here all night.

I sighed. "Volume is like…the weight, and size. So how many Weetbix you get for your money. See, it tells you here on the price-ticket how much it costs per hundred grams. You can compare those. On this one it's 64 cents, but on the smaller box it's 68 cents."

"What's a gram?" Pam asked.

"Fucked if I know" I said. I still struggled with the whole measurement system here.

Pam looked at me like I was an idiot and muttered "I might just look for yellow signs" and continued on walking. Still, that was another aisle down. At this rate we might be finished by the time Pam started school.

The next aisle was cookies and crackers. I checked the list. Nothing shown for cookies, just some crackers and I got Pam to grab them. OK, so we could press on through this aisle then. Pam was busy telling me a story about how she spent the day at preschool trying to avoid Harry, who, apparently, wanted to kiss her. "Kissing's yucky" she announced.

"Yep" I agreed. Of course I was pretty sure we'd agreed with Amelia on the same point and now I got the feeling she'd had a change of heart. It seemed a shame they started with all these sensible ideas and ended up mooning over stupid fucking sparkly vampires.

"But you kiss Mum" Pam pointed out.

"That's different" I said.

"Because she's not a boy? And boys are yucky?" Pam asked.

"Um..." I said, wondering how to explain it. I wasn't really sure that 'not a boy' was the sole criteria I had for liking Sookie and wanting to kiss her. "It's different. For grown-ups."

Pam thought for a minute. "Is Amelia a grown-up now?" she asked.

"Not really" I said, hoping this conversation would be over in a minute and we could get back to the groceries. I didn't really want to have my important parenting conversations in a fucking supermarket. Fuck knows, I'd probably say the wrong thing anyway, I didn't need to be distracted thinking of what we needed to buy next. Maybe we did need some cookies?

"But…she wants to kiss boys. I heard her saying it. To her friend." Pam looked at me confused. "So why does she want to? If she's not an adult?"

"Oh. Um. She thinks she's an adult. She's trying to do adult things" I said. Yeah, if Sookie wasn't baking until later in the week, we could definitely get cookies. I started looking for what looked good.

"Even if they're yucky? Like kissing boys?" Pam said.

"Yeah…um…I don't really know" I said, hoping to shut her down. "Maybe your mom knows. You could ask her. She knows more about kissing boys than I do."

"She does?" Pam asked, wrinkling her nose. "She kissed boys?"

"So I am led to believe" I said.

"I don't know if Tray and Sam count" Pam said. "Do they?"

I'd been looking at the cookies, trying to remember the ones I'd thought were nice before and lost the train of the conversation. "For what?" I asked.

"When Mom kisses them. It's different because she's mom and she kisses all of us. This is more like…you know, in the princess movies and stuff. The yucky kissing. That Amelia wants to do. Has Mom done that with boys?"

"Well, me Pam. She kisses me." This conversation had just fucking dragged on. Did Sookie and Pam normally talk this much shit when they bought groceries? Because there were more important things. Like finding the damn cookies.

"You're not really a boy" Pam said finally.

"No."

"I don't really get it" she admitted.

"OK. That's fine. You don't need to get it until you're older. Now help me find the cookies I like."

"Cookies?" Pam asked. "Are they on the list?"

"No" I confessed. "But I'm making an executive decision here. There isn't any baking and we need something to eat."

"But…but…but no." Pam looked upset. "No, Mum doesn't do that. She doesn't make zecutib 'cisions. We have to stick to the list!"

"She never adds things to the list?" I asked, finally locating what I wanted, and putting the bag in the cart. Fuck it, I'd get two bags. Otherwise the boys would eat them all before I got any. I added the second bag.

"Only stuff we need. Or, you know, specials."

"Yellow ticket" I said pointing. They were about ten cents off a bag, but I was sure it counted. "We're good."

Pam looked at me, looked at the ticket, and then back at me. And then she scanned the shelves before selecting a bright pink bag and throwing it in the cart. "If you're getting cookies, I'm getting cookies" she announced, challenging me to say no.

Fuck it; I just wanted to get this done. "Sure, Pam" I said. "Let's move on."

We got through the next few aisles relatively quickly, although Pam's insistence on being the only person allowed to put items in the cart made it all a bit slower. It got much slower when she insisted on pushing the cart, and nearly rammed some old biddy with it. I thought we were going to get yelled at for that, or at least I was, for being the inattentive parent. And I didn't think 'I would have been watching her but trying to read my wife's list is a fucking mission' was really an excuse, but luckily Pam said "Sorry" and actually looked sorry, and all she got was an "Oh, are you helping Daddy?" from the woman. I left Pam to hold that conversation because I was busy trying to work out what 'socks' meant.

When Pam was done talking I asked her. "What's the deal with socks, Pam? What does that mean?"

Pam looked a little confused and pointed to my feet. "You know. Like for your feet? Before shoes" she said.

"Yeah, I know what they are, but why is it written on the list? What does it mean?" I figured it had to be Sookie's shorthand for something, like her 't paper' meant paper towels.

"Um…socks" Pam said again. "We must have to buy socks."

"We buy socks from the supermarket?" I asked. How did I not know this shit? Did my socks come from the supermarket? When had I last bought socks? I couldn't remember. Mostly they wore out and new ones appeared in your drawer and once and twice the old ones had re-surfaced as a sock puppet. Or someone's cuddly. I never asked about them, because sometimes mentioning these things was a bad idea. Like pointing out when they came back from the laundry pile mismatched. Then all I got was a five minute lecture on how the poor underpants fairy could only get work-experience sock pixies and we should all just be fucking grateful there were clean socks at all. So I was, and I'd stopped thinking about the genesis of the socks.

Except now I was in charge of buying them. We moved to the next aisle and looked at the display of socks. "So…who needs socks?" I asked Pam. The list didn't specify. Maybe Sookie just bought for everyone at once.

Pam shrugged, so I guessed she didn't know either. Maybe I would just buy for us all then. Or for them anyway. I was pretty sure I didn't need socks. Not supermarket socks anyway.

"So…what size, do you think?" I asked Pam slowly. There were a lot of socks. Some of them looked like they might belong at our house. Actually all of them did. I guessed we'd been through a few sizes over the years. How the fuck were you supposed to know what size foot everyone had at this minute?

"Dunno" Pam said, looking at the socks. "Do I need socks?" she asked.

"Do you want socks?" I asked her.

"Maybe…those pink ones?" she said.

"Do you know what size?" I asked.

"Um…I'm four" she said.

"I don't know if that's the same as shoe size" I said, peering at some kid's socks. They had a size range and an age range listed, but…Sam and Tray had big feet, so would they be outside the age range? Fucked if I knew. This was way too hard, and surely didn't fit under the umbrella grocery shopping. No, this was clearly something else.

"Know what? I think we'll leave this for mom" I said.

"Is that OK?" Pam asked.

"Yeah, she said we could" I distinctly remembered Sookie saying we could leave anything we weren't sure on. "She'll do it sometime."

"So I don't get socks?" Pam asked.

"I don't think you need socks" I assured her.

"Is this a zecutib 'cision?" she asked.

"No, this is more…um. Knowing when to delegate. And we'll delegate this to Mom."

"Oh. Can you do that?" Pam asked, sounding impressed. "Just make Mom do whatever you want?"

"Well…not really. But she is the underpants fairy, so…sock buying kind of falls under her jurisdiction."

"Her ju…what?"

"Oh. It's her job."

"She has to buy socks?"

"It's more that she likes to buy socks." Sookie wasn't that thrilled about the cup that had 'Desperate Housewife' written on it, I didn't think she'd want Pam to think she was the family drudge.

"I guess…it would be mean if we did then?" Pam asked.

"Yeah. Like if I'd left you behind today. Because you like to buy groceries" I agreed.

Pam shrugged. "It's OK" she said. "I like the lollipops."

"Lollipops?" I asked.

"Yeah. I get a lollipop. At the end." Pam nodded emphatically.

"Um…I don't know" I said. "We got cookies. And you don't want to spoil your dinner."

"But I get a lollipop!" Pam said, getting louder. "That's the way it works! Mum says I've done a good job helping her get things and I get a lollipop. _That's_ why I come. Without the lollipop it's just boring. It's boring here. There's nothing to look at and all I do is walk beside the trolley. So I get a lollipop!" She balled up her fists and stamped her foot.

Yeah, that was a fucking tirade. The woman Pam had nearly mown down earlier walked past and looked at me pointedly. Fuck. She should have met Pam a couple of years earlier, by now she would have been face down on the floor. At least she was still upright, if a little purple in the face.

"If you're good, then we'll see" I said.

"But I've been good! I even let you get cookies!" She stamped her foot again.

Not for the first time, I wondered if Pam really got how this relationship worked. "Pam" I said, as calmly as I could. "I'm in charge, I make the rules and if I say no lollipop, there's no lollipop. All I'm saying is maybe. If you're good. So be good."

"Your rules are sucky" Pam muttered. "You make things up. Like zecutib 'cisions. They're not real and Mum won't like it."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Mum won't like you got cookies" Pam said. "I might tell her."

Fucking fantastic. Now I was being blackmailed for a fucking lollipop. "Yeah, just forget about the fucking cookies and you can have the lollipop" I said to her.

"Well…it is the rules" Pam said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "It is."

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Having been promised her lollipop at the end, Pam was being to being her cheerful little self again, and I just had to try to make sense of the list as best I could. I had to leave a few things out, but I think we got all the important stuff.

At the checkout Pam spent about five minutes choosing which lollipop she wanted from the display. I hadn't realised it was so fucking important. But apparently the tutti frutti ones aren't that nice, and you don't want anything that says it's 'something and cream' flavoured.

After we'd paid, Pam grabbed the receipt out of my hand. "Now we get to see how much discount we get" she said.

"Discount?" I asked.

"For the petrol. There's a voucher. At the bottom."

Oh. Well occasionally I managed to get one of these from Sookie, but given she had to fill her car and the work van with gas on a regular basis, she held onto them pretty tightly. "It's always the same" I said to Pam.

"No!" Pam disagreed. "You get four cents, or six cents, or ten cents. Sometimes it's twenty cents, and that's really good, because Mum says that actually makes a difference to the cost of a tank, the rest of them really don't. Hey, what did we get?" she thrust the receipt back at me.

"Oh, um. Twenty cents" I said. Fuck. I never knew you could get ones that high. Sookie had obviously been keeping all of those to herself and feeding me the shitty small discounts.

"Yay!" Pam said.

"Yay, indeed Pam."

As I was loading the groceries into the trunk of the car, a woman pulled up beside me, unloaded her toddler and gave me a pointed a look. I don't fucking know why. It was _parent's_ parking, and Pam was right there, sucking on her lollipop and talking about random shit again.

"See" Pam said. "I told you we weren't supposed to park here."

"It's fine Pam, now finish up that lollipop before we get home so the others don't see it."

SPOV

I got back from the gym just in time for Sam and Tray to arrive home on the walking bus. I tried to ignore the fact that Nathan's mum looked really happy to have delivered them home, like a great burden had just been lifted from her, and just organised afternoon tea. There wasn't a lot of stuff in the pantry. I hoped the shopping went OK.

Pam and Eric turned up not long after Amelia and Felicia had. Well, Felicia was first; she always moaned that Amelia walked far too slow. I think Amelia kind of did it deliberately, just so she didn't have to be seen with her sister. Mostly her presence in the house was just announced by a lot of slamming doors.

Pam bounced in first. "How'd it go?" I asked her. "Did Daddy do it alright?"

"Yeah" she said. "But he did the zecutib 'cisions and you don't."

"Oh. OK." I wondered what the executive decisions had involved.

Eric brought the first load of bags into the house, and then roped Sam and Tray into helping him carry the rest in. They weren't impressed given they'd been involved in a sneaky game of seeing who could push the other off the barstools while pretending to do some homework.

"That is a fuck-load of groceries" Eric said, when everything was in the kitchen.

"Yeah" I said, pulling stuff out and starting to put it away. "It's about normal. Should last about a week, maybe less."

"Fuck. No wonder the credit card is that high" Eric muttered, pulling off his tie.

"I know. I might have to put you out to stud" I agreed, forgetting Pam was standing right there. "What does Daddy have to do?" she asked.

"Nothing, Pam" I said.

"Is it adult stuff?" she asked.

"Kind of" I agreed.

"Like, um…kissing boys and stuff? Daddy said I should talk to you about that, but it's yucky. I don't want to."

"That's fine" I said, trying to figure out where the sugar was going to go. "You don't have to."

"Ever?" Pam asked.

"Ever" I moved some stuff around on a shelf.

Pam left and Eric tried to fit in the pantry with me. As big as the pantry was, it was really crowded with him in here too and didn't help the rearrangement of things required to fit the shopping in. I looked at what he was carrying. "Oh" I said. "You got Weetbix. That wasn't on the list, I stocked up last week." I gestured to the stack of boxes I already had sitting there. "Was it on sale?" I asked.

Eric nodded slowly. "Yeah…"he said. "So I thought…"

"Oh well, we'll eat it. Eventually" I said. "It's just finding a space that's the problem. Leave it on the bench and I'll deal with it shortly." Eric walked back out of the pantry and in a minute, I joined him.

"So you did it all OK?" I asked.

"Uh, we missed a few things out" Eric said. "But I think I got the important stuff."

"As long as you got toilet paper…" I said, and stopped when I saw the look that crossed Eric's face. "Fuck" he muttered. "But it wasn't on the list."

"It was" I said. "Look, I'll show you." Eric handed me the list and I pointed to it. "See? There. Where it says 't paper' "

Eric took the list back and peered at it again. "Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know what that means?" he asked.

"Oh well" I said. "Back to the shops tomorrow."

"Yeah" Eric muttered. "Maybe you'll get another discount coupon for petrol too. A really good one. Like the twenty cent one we got today."

Oh, poo. It wasn't that I deliberately kept the good vouchers from Eric, it was just, well. I filled up A LOT with running the kids around, and my car was used in the weekends. Plus I had the work van.

"Yeah" I agreed. "Maybe."

Pam wandered back into the kitchen. "We got cookies" she said.

"Biscuits" I corrected, automatically, and then I processed what she'd said. "Really?" I asked Eric. They definitely weren't on the list.

"Yeah, zecutib 'cision" Pam said. "And I was really good and got a lollipop."

"Did you?" I asked.

"I thought we weren't mentioning the cookies, Pam?" Eric asked her, looking up from the bag he was unpacking.

Pam shrugged. "Zecutib 'cision" she said, and she walked out again.

"Wow" I said to Eric. "You guys should do the shopping again. She's learnt all sorts of new stuff."

"Yeah" Eric said darkly. "Just what I fucking needed."

"Did you get any socks? Only I think Tray is wearing Sam's because he grew out of all of his?"

"Fuck" Eric muttered again, looking at the bags like some might magically appear.

"Thank-you" I said, going over and putting my arm around him. "It was a good first try. Next week, I'm sure you guys will have the hang of it."

Eric looked a bit worried. Yeah, I wasn't sure what he found worse, the actual shopping, or dealing with Pam while shopping. And she could be sneaky if she wanted something. Like lollipops. I tried to avoid buying them for her, because she didn't really need them. Eric had obviously been a bit of an easy target though

"I guess…if you really needed me to…" Eric said.

"I think I'll be fine. Plus, I can tell Pam all about kissing boys" I said. I laughed, and Eric looked a bit less worried.

"Yeah, maybe you should practice first" Eric said grabbing me for a kiss.

Pam must have come back because I heard her say "See! Yucky!" in the background. Yep, with any luck maybe I wouldn't have to talk to her about it at all.

**A/N Zucchini and courgette are exactly the same thing, but don't tell Eric. Kumara is pronounced Koom-ah-rah.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N So if anyone is wondering, the toddler is still kicking around. Mostly these days she's clutching a Barbie and yelling "I a pwincess!"**

**On another note, I'm off on my holidays at the weekend (yay) so not sure if there'll be anymore before that,and there won't be anything while I'm away as there is no room to pack my laptop along with all the colouring in books and Barbie dolls I have to include.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

Schedule Night, as Sookie liked to call it, was great for telling us all where we were meant to be at any particular time, but it didn't always mean it was easy to actually get there.

Felicia's netball had started again and she'd ambushed me in the office at home and made me promise to come along and watch. If she could, I'm pretty sure she would have made me sign something in blood.

I'd had a pretty rapid introduction to netball when Felicia had started playing. At first I couldn't figure out why she wasn't just playing basketball, it seemed like pretty much the same thing. But, apparently, that wasn't acceptable. Here they'd invented their own kind of game so little girls could dream of being Silver Ferns and beating the Australian team in a particularly humiliating fashion. At least that seemed to be Felicia's current goal in life, and she liked to get in as much practice as she could by throwing a ball at the heads of her brothers. I didn't know how they felt about being stand-ins for the Australian netball team, but luckily they were too busy ducking Felicia's lobs to worry about it.

But now that I had some kind of idea about how the whole game worked, it wasn't so bad, and I could see that Felicia was actually quite good at it. Well, she was good at intercepting passes, which was a nice way of saying she could jump in front of the other players and snatch the ball away from them, while maybe accidentally on purpose landing on their foot. Also she was great at marking her opposite player. Marking seemed to involve shadowing some other girl, trying to push her out of the way, occasionally elbowing her, and all while, if Felicia was to be believed, the pair of them kept up a constant stream of insults muttered under their breath.

The only thing Felicia wasn't so hot at was shooting goals, and that made her really pissed. For some reason she really wanted to be one of the players allowed to shoot and her coach wouldn't put her in that position and that made Felicia fucking grumpy. I bore the brunt of that one, as she'd complain to me, like I could do something about it. I figured that what she needed to do was just practice. So I kept telling her that. Repeatedly. Sometimes it maybe wasn't the best answer, because she'd immediately go and do just that and occasionally it was actually dinner time and I'd have to haul her back inside before her brothers divided up her dinner amongst themselves.

But I liked watching her play, and she liked me being there. It's just sometimes that took a bit of organisation.

"So you're coming aren't you?" Sookie asked me on the morning of Felicia's first game, sounding like Felicia herself.

"Yes" I replied, trying to get past Tray and Sam who were just kind of standing around in the kitchen waiting for Sookie to give them their backpacks. "Move, guys" I tried, and eventually Sam took one step forward, but he wasn't taking his eyes off Sookie. I put my cup in the dishwasher and waited for what was coming next.

"OK" Sookie said, now that Tray and Sam had what they needed and she could take a step back. "So, you get Pam, I'll get the boys and we'll meet here, then get Felicia and Amelia on the way there. Felicia will have to get changed at school before we get her, which she'll be grumpy about, but their schools are on the way to the netball centre, and no one else is. So that's OK?"

Sookie looked at me expectantly. "Um, sure" I said. "That'll be fine."

Of course it wasn't as fine as I'd hoped it would. My appointment with someone in the city ran late, and when I went to collect Pam, she was eating her afternoon snack and didn't want to be rushed. "But I have to have my fruit first, then the muffin, and I can't just eat the muffin" she explained, while I stood behind the table of kids who were all staring at me curiously. I was kind of used to the place now we were onto the fifth kid, and it was hard to believe than in a couple more weeks we'd never come back here ever again.

Those were sobering thoughts, but I didn't really have time to dwell on them now. Mostly I needed Pam to eat quickly so we could go. But Pam was not someone you could rush.

"You're tall" the kid next to Pam said to me.

"Yeah" I agreed. That seemed to satisfy the kid and he went back to making a pile of muffin crumbs.

Eventually Pam had finished and she went through the routine of returning her plate to the kitchen, wiping her hands, and then we could get her bag and drive home to meet the others.

Sookie, Sam and Tray were waiting for us in the front yard when we got there. "Finally" Sam muttered, when we got out of my car.

"OK, let's get going" Sookie said, hustling the boys to her car.

"I don't want to go" Tray whined. "It's so boooring there."

"We're going to see your sister play" I said. "And because Kennedy's gone back to Australia just so she doesn't have to look after you for the afternoon."

"Is that why?" Tray asked.

"Is she coming back?" Pam asked, looking stricken. "Because Kassidy said I could wear her Snow White costume when I played with her. She _promised_."

"They've just gone for a holiday" Sookie said, climbing into the passenger seat. "They'll be back soon."

"But will Kassidy remember about the costume?" Pam asked. "Because I don't know if she will? Can we send her an email or something? So she remembers? She might not remember, a few weeks is a long time?" Thankfully Pam didn't know that we had the spare set of keys to Danny and Kennedy's house, or else she'd be demanding we go in there and pin a note to the costume that read 'Pam's'.

"No" I said, starting the car and reversing out of the driveway. Well, I would have, if I hadn't been aware of a certain amount of movement going on in the back seat. "Tray" I said, without turning around. "Do your seatbelt up."

The movement stopped and I continued reversing and drove down the road. Pam was obviously still thinking about Kassidy though. "Will she be back for my birthday party?" she asked Sookie. "Because I told her she could sit next to me when we eat, although Izzy wants to sit next to me too. And I said that she could, but Bella couldn't. Bella's kind of stupid. That's not the cat Bella, though. That's Bella from pre-school. Bella A., not Little Bella. Little Bella's only little. She's not coming to my party because she's only a Kiwi and not a Pukeko like me. And Bella O. had her happy leaving day and went to school. Not my school though. I don't think. What school did she go to, Mum? Is it the same one I'm going to?"

"Yes" Sookie said, looking through her bag for something.

"Yes, what?" Pam asked.

"Yes Kassidy is back for the party, and yes Bella is going to the same school as you."

"No, I don't think she is. I think that's only Bella M."

"Well, OK then. You're right" Sookie agreed. I just hadn't realised there were so many fucking Bella's in the world. I guess it maybe made it easier for the teachers, but fuck, how did Pam keep track of them all.

"Mum. I'm hungry" Tray complained.

"You just had something to eat" Sookie said, throwing her bag down by her feet.

"Yeah. But that was before. And then we had to wait for Dad and Pam and now I'm hungry again."

"I didn't bring anything" Sookie muttered.

"But I'm hungry" Tray complained, as if that fact was enough to make Sookie suddenly produce something he could eat. It had never fucking worked for any of the rest of us, but I guess he felt he was special.

"I get that" Sookie said, through slightly gritted teeth. "But I forgot the snacks I was going to bring. If you guys hadn't needed breaking apart so you'd behave, I might have remembered it."

"That's not my fault" Sam piped up.

"It's no one's _fault_. It just happened" Sookie said.

"I didn't forget anything though, so it's not my fault either" Tray said, indignantly.

"Yeah, but you made Mum come back outside because you yelled" Sam pointed out. "So that bit was your fault."

"But that's not the food" Tray countered. "That's the bit where I had to sit by the front door so Mum could see me and she said if we just stopped trying to kill each other for five minutes and behave she'd forget she ever saw the cricket bat and she wouldn't say anything to Dad…" Tray trailed off. "So, how long until dinnertime?" he asked casually.

"Dinner will be after the game" Sookie explained.

"But we're not even _there_ yet!" Tray complained.

"Yeah, I know" I said. Fuck, and we still had another two kids to collect.

SPOV

Eric loved his family, but maybe not so much when he was trapped in a car with all of them. They were loud and liked complaining, hitting their siblings who were doing the complaining, and then complaining they'd been hit by their siblings in retaliation. After particularly stressful journeys he would wonder out loud if we should trade in my people mover for one of those vans used to transport prisoners, where every person was shackled into their own separate cage in the back. I think he was joking. Half-joking, anyway.

And it was always worse when they didn't even want to go to the destination. It was a bit of a pain in the bum having to take four other kids to Felicia's game, but with Kennedy inconveniently currently in Sydney, I didn't really have a choice. There wasn't time to take the kids anywhere else and I didn't trust Amelia to actually come home in time to look after the younger kids like she'd said she would now she'd reached the magic age of 14. So we were kind of stuck dragging all of them across Auckland.

Sam, Pam and Tray were in full-swing of a mostly-silent war by the time we got Amelia in the car. They were pretty good at sensing when Eric really wasn't in the mood to listen to a lot of yelling and they had reverted to trying to see who would yell in pain first. Felicia was rabbiting on about the game and saying she really hoped that Sita wasn't there today and maybe she'd get a chance at Goal Attack rather than Goal Defence.

But when Amelia got in the car, her sour mood infected the others and it went very silent and very still. She was incredibly annoyed I had not only said she couldn't babysit, which she wasn't that keen on anyway, but that she wasn't to stay home alone. Her argument that Yvetta stayed home alone 'all the time now' just didn't cut it, with me or with Eric. Consequently we were both on her shit list and she was going to make us pay with the silent treatment.

Her siblings, however, got something else. "Stop knocking me" she hissed at Felicia.

"I have to re-tie my laces" Felicia said. "Sorry!"

"You should be" Amelia said haughtily.

"You're such a bitch" Felicia muttered, and I really wished I hadn't heard her.

"Talk to each other nicely" I said, over my shoulder. "No names please."

Once upon a time Amelia would have said something to point out just how bad Felicia had been, but all she did now was turn her face to the window and try to ignore the rest of us.

She wasn't feeling any better by the time we actually reached the netball centre, which was way over in St Johns and not far from the weird suburb they'd created in an old quarry. I could kind of see the advantage of the nice new houses they sold there, but I would miss living somewhere with old, established trees around. Plus your neighbours were very close, it was one thing for Kennedy and the inebriated Mrs Bodehouse to have to put up with my kids' screams and yelling, but I didn't want to know that the house next door's windows were only about two metres from the fence, it could make for a lot of neighbour turnover.

Eric didn't seem to want to talk to me about the disadvantages of that suburb though. Granted, I'd probably mused on a similar theme when we'd been here before, but I thought it was interesting. They were still building houses there, it was very popular. I kind of wanted to go and look at the show homes, but I'd have to go sometime when I was by myself so I wouldn't be too embarrassed by my kids. I loved show homes; they were like dolls' houses for grownups. Mum had liked them too, it had been cheap entertainment at the weekends when I was a kid going to look through a show home in some far-flung suburb and listening to Mum exclaim over how lovely it all was. Well, she and I liked that activity. Dad and Jason preferred parking at the end of Puhinui Road and watching the planes land at the airport. Yeah, my parents were great at finding free things to do.

So by the time we got to the netball centre, Eric was looking strained, Amelia was still brooding, Felicia was starting to get stressed she might be late, and everyone else was trying to lie low, while maybe occasionally throwing the odd complaint in about this wasn't their most favourite activity.

EPOV

Sookie's car might have been about the biggest vehicle we could buy, but somehow, when there were seven people in there, it could seem fucking small. I wasn't sure what was worse though, the kids complaining about shit, the silent torture of each other which I had to pretend I didn't know was taking place, or Amelia's foul mood affecting everyone else. She wasn't pleasant to be around at the moment, and I know that for all her writing it off as 'just a part of being a teenage girl', Sookie felt it the worst.

So I was fucking glad when we got the netball centre, which was on the other fucking side of Auckland near the houses that had been built in a quarry and which always made Sookie muse out loud about the benefits of living in a house built in a quarry, and I could just concentrate on Felicia and the game. I hoped.

She was bristling to go and join her team. "Just keep your eye on the ball…" I tried saying, but she brushed me off.

"Yeah, I know! I do know how to play netball, Dad" she grumbled, while looking at where her team was standing around beside their coach.

"Just hang on though, watch the ball, try and get the intercepts and keep it away from their shooters."

Felicia rolled her eyes and tightened her ponytail simultaneously. "Well, duh. That's the point of being Goal Defence."

"And if you have to take out one of their shooters in the process, just don't get caught." That made Felicia pay more attention to me.

"Really?" she asked. "Just, like…really?"

"Well, that's the point of being Goal Defence, isn't it? You're the last thing standing between the ball and the other team getting it in the circle. So it's either get the ball or take a player out. Or both. But don't get caught and give them the advantage."

Felicia looked down, and then sideways, and then back up at me. "I've been trying to grow my fingernails" she admitted, holding her hands up.

"Yep, that'll work." The coach had said to me that although she didn't encourage it, scratching was pretty rife amongst the players. I'd seen some of the scratches Felicia had come home with. Girls were fucking dirty fighters, that was for sure. "Just watch the referee and keep it under the radar. Now good luck, and have a fucking good game."

"Cool. OK, see you!" Felicia said and then she ran off. Yeah, I was pretty sure I rocked at encouraging my kids to do well. Certainly where sport and Felicia were involved, anyway. Ever since she'd been two and we'd gone to that soccer class together and she'd figured out she got high-fives for collecting more bean-bags than anyone else, she'd wanted to win at everything. She had a pretty high success rate, and her team had a reasonably good chance tonight I thought, when I got a good look at the size of the girls in the other team. Yeah, Felicia would be alright, as long as the referee didn't see her do anything too fucking violent. It was probably a good thing she'd learnt to fight under the radar at home.

Sookie had got the other kids out of the car and was trying to encourage them to actually stay off the courts and not interfere in any of the other games going on. Well, except Amelia. She was still sitting in the car, head down, probably reading one of her stupid fucking books. Or texting someone. Fuck. I had no idea what to do with teenage girls, I'd thought babies were hard to figure out but this was a hundred times worse.

I hoped like fuck Sookie knew what we could do with her.

SPOV

It was always a hassle trying to stop the boys wandering into everyone else's games when we came to watch the netball. They got bored incredibly easily and the pushing and shoving started. Normally I could bribe them with food, but I'd left the snacks at home in between trying to feed the animals and make sure no one got brain-damaged by being smacked by a cricket bat. I had managed to located one small box of raisins in my bag, but I wasn't getting that out because no way would it be shared nicely and it would just lead to a fight over food.

Eventually though, the boys drifted off and I just hoped they weren't playing in the traffic or anything stupid. Or stacking up traffic cones next to our car in the hope we could take them home to use for goals. That had happened the last time we'd brought them, and it had just been embarrassing trying to work out where they'd been placed in the carpark while my kids whinged that "they were just sitting there, so I don't think they'll mind if we take a couple".

At least Eric was here this time and he could keep an eye on them, although he was currently stalking up and down the side-lines yelling what were meant to be encouraging things at Felicia like "Take the intercept, Leesh!", and "Watch your passing!" Felicia was at least used to him doing it and took it with good grace. He would have annoyed the tripe out of me by now and I might have been tempted to tell him to take his intercept and shove it somewhere unpleasant. But he did mean well, he just got caught up in it all. So much so that he occasionally yelled less encouraging things at the referee when he disagreed with a decision, because after all, the rules of netball, a game he'd only found out existed about two or three years earlier, was one of Eric's specialist subjects. The referees tended to take these things with less tolerance that Felicia did, but we hadn't been banned from a game. Yet.

With the boys gone, Eric otherwise occupied and Amelia sulking in the car that just left me with Pam. "Do you think Daddy will come to my games?" she asked. "When I play netball?"

"I'm sure he will" I said. I got the feeling though that Pam didn't really fancy the netball so much as the fact of having Daddy's attention.

"Will I have to wear that uniform though?" Pam asked. "Or can I wear a different colour?"

Yeah, yellow and royal blue wasn't a great colour combination and a bright yellow top was never going to do anything for Pam's pale complexion, but I doubted they would change it just for her. "I don't think you get a choice" I explained. "That's the colours for the school team."

Pam sighed. "Maybe they'd change it?"

"Well, you've got a few years yet. Maybe they will" I agreed.

One of the other mothers, someone I vaguely recognised from last year's games, came over to say hello. "It's hard getting back into the routine of it all" she said. "It seems like we just finished last season, and now this one's starting and we're stuck standing out here freezing every Thursday night while the kids have to play in the dark."

"Mmm" I agreed. Yeah, standing on a freezing netball court in the middle of winter was not my idea of fun. Felicia moaned occasionally about the cold, but at least she was running round.

"Your daughter's good" the other mother commented. I murmured a thank-you and tried desperately to remember which girl was her's so I could say something back. I didn't want to say it for the sake of saying it, in case it wasn't true. But she continued on. "She's quite tall though, I guess that helps" she mused. Right, I figured out which kid was hers. The one that wasn't that much taller than Pam.

"I think it's just practice as much as anything, which why your daughter's holding her own" I said. "The height was just a fluke on Felicia's part." It could have gone either way really, I wasn't short, neither was Bill particularly, but the women of his family were and my mum was pretty tiny. I sometimes looked at Pam and thought that was who she was going to take after; she had Mum's paleness and small frame. Me, I looked like Aunty Linda and Gran.

I hadn't quite registered the frown on the woman's face, and then she looked over at Eric, and back at me. "But her father's tall" she said, as if I'd missed that fact. Here is where once upon a time I might have gone into more detail and explained that Eric was her step-father, but as time wore on it started to feel a bit disloyal and, quite frankly, not really anyone else's business. Felicia didn't really feel that Eric was anything other than her dad, as annoying as he might be yelling from the side-lines, so I wasn't about to spill the story of her birth to random mothers from school. So all I said was "Yeah, he is" and left it at that.

Eventually the other mother left us to talk to someone else, and it was just Pam and I again. "I wish we had pink milk" she grumbled.

"I know" I said. For some reason strawberry milk was still always pink milk to Pam, it was one of the few things from when she was tiny that she still clung to. In fact some of the other kids had been known to refer to it that way as well.

I kind of wished she had a few other toddler sayings still kicking around because it was sad to say goodbye to my last baby, the one I didn't think I was actually going to have. But I was looking forward to Fridays by myself at home. I had plans for getting stuff done.

Eric just had plans to avoid any mention of Pam going to school, I think. He'd been dragging his feet about getting the old uniforms out the roof, and it wasn't just his usual distaste for poking around up there. No, Eric wasn't ready to let Pam go yet. Unfortunately for him, he didn't get the final say on that one because she was more than ready to go.

"I get new shoes for school, don't I?" she asked, as we stood there watching the game.

"Um…well….probably" I said. That was about all I was committing to. There was the odd pair of shoes kicking around in storage, although mainly they were things like gumboots and crocs, as most shoes got worn out.

"I have skinny feet" Pam reminded me. She'd had a shop assistant tell her that once when she was measured for shoes, and she was clinging to that fact.

"You do" I agreed, as Eric came wandering over to talk to us, although he kept his eyes on where Felicia's coach was talking to the team during the break between quarters. I think he might have actually liked to be giving that talk himself, but I wasn't sure the team really needed seven Felicias.

"She's doing well" I said to Eric.

"Yeah" he said. "She managed to avoid their Goal Keep who's been trying to push her over since the game started. Fucking referee doesn't seem to notice though." I felt kind of sorry for the referee quite frankly. Most of them were university students who charged a nominal fee for doing it, but it seemed a pretty thankless task.

"Felicia can handle herself, though" I reminded Eric. I'd seen her elbow the opposition more than once already today, she just hadn't been caught by the referee. It was nice to see all that time she spent fighting on the side with her brothers was finally paying off.

"Yeah, but there's fucking rules Sookie. The referee just seems to be incapable of applying them correctly. What their team is doing is blatant." Eric crossed his arms and frowned.

I didn't like to point out he hadn't exactly read the rules himself, and his rules seemed to be based heavily around the idea that all was fine as long as our team was winning.

Felicia came jogging over for her water bottle, and Eric managed to get out a reminder to try to get the ball out to the Centre when she got it, because the Centre seemed to be the only other girl who really knew what she was doing. Felicia just nodded and jogged back to her team. The game started up again, and Eric resumed his place further down where he could keep an eye on Felicia's part of the court.

Amelia finally decided to grace us with her presence, so I figured she'd stopped getting a reply from Yvetta to her texts, or something. She didn't say anything, just came over and stood next to me, on the other side from Pam. Pam decided to try some conversation though. "I'm getting new shoes" she announced. "For school."

Amelia sighed. "They'll be from Kmart" she said.

Pam processed that. "But they'll be new" she said. "And not from the roof." Yeah, being the first-born was very different to being the last-born. Amelia didn't quite get the whole joy of something being yours and only yours. I felt sorry for Pam, but not sorry enough to run the family into debt for the sake of buying her a new wardrobe she'd grow out of.

"It's Kmart, Pam. Like, a hundred sweaty feet will have tried them on already. Plus some kid in China your age probably made them." It felt really wrong, but I desperately wanted to tell Amelia to cheer the hell up and stop bringing her sister down. It wouldn't do any good, though. She'd just turn on me and that wouldn't end well. For all I was trying to play it cool it hurt that I'd sunk so low in Amelia's estimation. I knew she had to go through this stage, but it might have been nicer if she just kept some of her thoughts to herself.

Pam looked hurt, but didn't say anything else, and the three of us stood in silence and watched Felicia, and Eric for a bit. Then I realised that maybe it wasn't a good thing that we hadn't seen either of the boys for a while.

"Can you go around the side there and see what Tray and Sam are up to?" I asked Amelia.

"Why?" she asked me.

"Well…just to make sure they're OK."

"Yeah, but you wouldn't let me stay at home with them, so, like, are you really sure that I can be trusted to check on them? Maybe you'd better ask Pam." Amelia looked at me and waited to see what I'd say next. I kind of wished I had Felicia here instead, she was much better at checking up on her siblings, or even just plain spying on them.

"No, I need you to go" I said, trying to keep my voice level. "So please just do this, and maybe sometime I will let you stay home and babysit."

Amelia sighed and then shuffled off. "Is Amelia going to look after us?" Pam asked.

"Maybe sometime" I said.

"I hope it's sometime she's being nice" Pam said. Yeah, poor Pam. She'd always been Amelia's pet, but lately Amelia's disgust with the rest of the world and everything in it had even included her favourite sibling and Pam was a bit confused at the way things kept changing from day to day.

"Well, that'll be a condition of doing it" I said to Pam.

Amelia came back and shrugged. "They're round there with some other kid" she said. "They've found some sticks…or something." She didn't seem too concerned, but maybe, I thought, it would pay to check.

"So in your opinion" I asked, "is anything they're currently doing likely to result in injury or damage to anybody or anything?"

"No?" Amelia said. "I don't know. I think they're OK. It's just a stick. Or sticks. I think they're just hitting the hedge."

I wasn't sure if that made me feel better about it or not, but Eric came over and I sent him to look at what they were doing. He came back and reported it was fairly harmless and I left it at that. Hopefully all their earlier aggression had dissipated after the incident with the cricket bat. If not, maybe they would just slowly run out of energy from the fact I hadn't brought any food with me.

"I'm a bit hungry" Pam said.

"Well, it will be finished soon" I told her.

"And then we'll all have to tell Felicia how wonderful she was for running around and throwing a ball. Big whoop" Amelia said.

"Don't be horrible to your sister" I warned her, but it probably fell on deaf ears. It certainly fell on ears that were ignoring me. And continued to ignore me for the rest of the game, while Pam made occasional conversation and Sam and Tray turned back up eventually to remind me that they were hungry.

When it was all over Felicia and Eric came over. "Did you see what she did to me?" Felicia said, holding up her arm for examination. "She was really brutal."

Eric shrugged. "You just need to learn to dodge them" he said. Yep, that was from the man who would walk straight into me if I stopped to look at a shop window, but I didn't point that out to him. I commiserated with Felicia and said well done, as her team had managed to scrape to victory by a mere two goals. I was kind of happy about that, because at least it saved us all listening to Eric's strategy for the next game on the way home.

"Thank God that's finished" Sam muttered.

"Bog off, dog-food face" Felicia retorted. I tried to remember where that one had come from; I thought it was a line from the TV show _Red Dwarf_. Who would have guessed that the one thing Felicia would have inherited from Bill was his taste in TV. Literally inherited when she discovered the box of DVDs that were kicking around. She'd loved her first taste of English comedy and had never gone back.

Sam just shrugged it off; it wasn't anything he hadn't heard before. And he'd probably heard worse when I was out of ear-shot. God knows, they all heard enough swearing on a regular basis to string together some pretty foul language when they wanted to.

"That referee was a bit fucking loose with the rules" Eric complained as we walked back to the car. "I'm pretty sure she knew half the other team from her baby-sitting jobs and that didn't exactly make her particularly fucking impartial."

"They still won" I pointed out.

Eric didn't reply, he just huffed and got in the car, as did everyone else, although there was a certain amount of jostling for seats and at one point Amelia loudly declared "I'm the eldest so I get my seat, not that seat. So move!"

Tray considered holding out, but decided to give up the seat, and go back to annoying Sam and Pam instead. "Grow up" Pam said to him, mainly because everyone else said that to him, but luckily Tray didn't pull her up on the fact she was actually still younger than he was.

We drove out of the netball centre carpark and on past the Stonefields suburb. It looked kind of cold and dank at night, all the houses sitting down in the valley carved out by the quarry, with high stone walls surrounding them. "See I think that in the winter it would be kind of miserable living in there. You'd never get any sun" I said, but no one responded to that. Instead Tray said "I'm starving!"

"No you're not" Pam piped up. "You're just a bit hungry!" She sounded really pleased with herself for coming up with that one. Amelia just muttered "So lame" under her breath.

"Well, dinner isn't too far away" I said, although I was aware that I had to get home and actually find something for everyone to eat.

"It's ages away" Sam complained.

"I'm hungry too" Felicia moaned. "_And_ I just played netball, so, you know. You're supposed to feed me. Otherwise my fat eats up all my muscle…or something. I don't know, but I need food."

I looked over at Eric. "It'll have to be McDonalds" I said. "We can go through the drive-thru at Greenlane on the way home."

Eric sighed, and nodded and just after the Greenlane roundabout, he pulled into the McDonalds drive-thru and queued up behind the other cars.

"So what am I ordering?" Eric asked.

"Oh, um. What does everyone want?" I asked turning around. This is where it got difficult.

Sam and Tray ummed and ahhed over which burgers they wanted, but finally settled on their choices. Pam wanted a Happy Meal with nuggets "And if they say girl toy or boy toy, remember I want a girl toy, OK Daddy?" she reminded Eric.

"Uh-huh" Eric said, not sounding very enthused.

"I want, um, a Big Mac" Felicia said. "I've been running around."

"OK" I agreed. "And what do you want, Amelia?"

"Nothing" she said sullenly. "Nothing at all from here, it's all crap and they destroy all the rainforests to make space for the cows."

"Uncle Jase has cows" Tray pointed out. "But I don't think he has a rainforest."

Amelia sighed. "You doofus. They're different cows, for milk not meat."

"Yeah, but it's still not a rainforest" Tray argued. "So you know, you're wrong."

"And you're just a kid, so you know nothing" Amelia complained.

"So…vegetable burger?" I asked Amelia.

"I guess" she said. "Although I don't think it's right to keep funding the American capitalists like that. They're just ruining the planet and making us eat crap." That was obviously designed to get a reaction out of Eric, but he wasn't interested. He had bigger problems as we were nearly at the speaker and he needed to give everyone's order.

"So, what are we getting?" he asked me.

"OK, we need a Big Mac meal, one Quarter Pounder meal, one Filet of Fish meal, but with an extra cheeseburger on the side. Actually get about four cheeseburgers, just in case, because you'll eat any extras, won't you?" Eric didn't reply so I carried on. "One vege burger…"

"Just the burger" Amelia called out. "The fries are just chemicals and fat."

"OK so just the burger, and a Happy Meal with nuggets and a girl toy. So most of those will have Sprite, but Pam do you want water instead?"

"Yeah" Pam replied. She didn't like bubbles in her drinks.

"And what are you getting?" Eric asked me.

"One of the new ones" I said.

"One of the new what?"

"Burgers, you know the ones they've been showing on TV. Like on the sign there, but I want the beef not the chicken version. No, maybe I do want the chicken? Um…no go with beef, otherwise you won't remember. And Diet Coke."

"OK" Eric said, kind of tersely. "I think I've got it."

He placed the order, with only a tiny bit of prompting from me, and then we slowly progressed on to the next window to pay. "I'm still sad this isn't a Georgie Pie anymore" I said. "I liked Georgie Pie."

"I just can't believe how fucking expensive it is for all of us" Eric grumbled, as they were processing our payment. "I mean, fuck. McDonalds used to be a cheap snack, not the same price as a fucking banquet."

And then Amelia exploded. "Oh my God!" she yelled. "We get it! You're old! Georgie Pie has gone, get over it! And yes, things cost more than they did in the dark ages when you all used stones or…or…whatever! God!" And then she slumped back against the seat.

"You have so many problems" Felicia said to her. "I just don't know where to start."

"Start with yourself" Amelia said to her. "You smell."

"Everyone shut up before we get to the next window" Eric said. "I do not need to entertain the staff of fucking McDonalds as they hand over the food you lot have fucking whined about getting since we left this afternoon. Anyone who wants to eat tonight, will fucking keep quiet and be thankful they're getting dinner."

There was silence in the car for a bit, and Eric took the bags of food through the window and handed them to me. As he started to drive off I checked through them all, making sure nothing had been forgotten because no way did I want to get home and discover someone was missing a burger. And then something occurred to me.

"What did you order?" I asked Eric, and he drove slowly out of the drive- thru exit and into the carpark of the adjoining supermarket.

"What do you mean?" he asked tersely.

"For yourself" I clarified, dreading the answer.

"Fuck" Eric said quietly.

"That's OK" I said, trying to remain positive. "Just pull into a parking spot and someone can run in."

"I'll go!" Sam volunteered. He was usually the one who liked to volunteer for jobs, but maybe this time he had extra incentive for wanting to get out of the car. Between Eric's annoyance and Amelia's random outbursts tension was running pretty high.

I handed my debit card to Sam. "What do you want?" I asked Eric.

"Oh, well. Um. I'll have one of those new things too" he said. "Same as your mother. Except I want the beef one."

"I got the beef one" I blurted out without thinking.

"No" Eric said, slowly. "You wanted the chicken, remember?"

I decided, for the sake of peace, to just go with that one. "Yeah" I said, and then I turned back to Sam. "You know my pin number for the card?" I asked.

He rolled his eyes. "Yep, 'course I do" he said, and then he climbed over Pam, opened the door and walked into McDonalds.

This left me with the problem of entertaining everyone else. I tried a game of 'I Spy', except no one was buying it, and mostly the smell of the food already in the car was driving them wild, so I broke out one of the cartons of fries and handed it around. Felicia decided to try to pick an argument with Amelia over the fact Amelia ate some, when she hadn't wanted fries, but Amelia said Felicia was just being stupid. Pam just wanted to get hold of her toy, and, when she did, she fretted that it might be a boys' toy and not a girls' one, and wanted me to go in and ask. I tried to persuade her that it was actually a unisex toy, being some character from whatever the latest movie was, but she wasn't entirely convinced. And then Sam turned up anyway.

"Thank fuck we can leave" Eric said, by way of thank you. Sam handed me the bag of food and Eric's drink which I fitted into a cup-holder. "That's Coke, right? Not Diet Coke?" Eric asked. Luckily he was reversing at the time and didn't catch the momentary flash of uncertainty across Sam's face before Sam just said. "Yep. It is."

It was hard to blame him, I knew where he'd learnt that trick from.

Dinner was pretty much demolished within about five minutes of our arrival home, and then Tray and Sam started complaining we hadn't bought any sundaes so we broke out the ice cream. The kids had had so much junk food by that stage that it was hard to see how any more would hurt them.

And then we had to get them into bed, so it was a while before Eric and I could sit down together over coffee. "That went OK" I said to Eric.

"Yep" he agreed. "Although the five of them in the small space can be a bit fucking much sometimes."

"And we got to see Felicia win" I added, determined to try to keep it all positive. I got enough negativity from Amelia at the moment.

"Uh-huh" Eric agreed. "That was good, she's pretty fucking awesome."

"She is" I agreed.

"And the boys didn't kill that other kid" Eric added.

"Don't want to know" I told him.

"And Pam is, she informed me, getting new shoes."

"Well…maybe. Probably. She'll need them for school I guess."

"Mmm" Eric said, not liking the 's' word. "So that just leaves Amelia" he continued. "Who is a total fucking drag."

"Yeah" I mused. "She's just…well its hormones. And everything else that goes along with being a teenage girl. All that drama and stuff. It must get her down, living it. It gets me down just being around her."

"Uh-huh" Eric agreed. "I just wish I knew what to do to help her fucking get over it. I'm kind of stumped." He took a sip of coffee and pulled out his phone. And that was when it hit me that if Eric was out of ideas about Amelia, we might actually be in trouble.

**A/N Our national netball team is named the Silver Fern. The silver fern is the national emblem of New Zealand and shows up on all our sports uniforms.**

**Kiwis and Pukekos (poo-keck-ohs) are native birds, and used as the name of the groups at Pam's pre-school.**

**Puhinui Road is pronounced Poo-heh-noo-ee**

**Georgie Pie was our own fast-food chain until McDonald's bought it out. We're sad.**

**And if anyone needs to know the rules of netball, try -**

**www (dot) netballonline (dot) com/TheGame/Technical/NetballRules**

**If you actually want to actually see a game (it's NZ vs Australia), then try this link -**

**www (dot) youtube (dot) com /watch?v=8BADqwSU78M&NR=1**

**Thanks for reading!**


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N So I totally ignored what needed to be done today, and now my packing will most likely consist of shoving the unfolded pile of washing on my bed into a suitcase and hoping for the best. Oops. But I managed to get another chapter cranked out, so that kind of counts, right? I'm sure the kids won't mind spending a week and a half barefoot because I forgot to pack shoes.**

**Anyway, this chapter features Amelia's point of view, because, well, she's fourteen. And has stuff to say.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, which is great because there won't be room in the suitcase for them.**

APOV

Sometimes I really hate my family. Well, a lot of the time actually. Everyone else I know has, like, one brother or sister, or maybe even none. None would be nice. Yvetta doesn't have little brothers or sisters. That's because she says her step-dad, that guy Franklin, couldn't get it up. She heard her mum talking about it. Or her mum said something to her. I really like Yvetta's mum, she lets me call her Ana and doesn't try to hide stuff about sex from us like my mum does. Which is really stupid when you think about it, because it's, like, so freaking obvious what she was doing all those years she kept popping out babies.

But Ana's really cool and fun to hang out with, even if Yvetta says she's a drag sometimes when she's tired and just wants to sleep. She gets tired working at that bar in Kingsland, but she's said she might be able to get Yvetta and me jobs there in a couple of years, so that would be cool. It really goes off there when there's a game on at Eden Park.

Yvetta's lucky because sometimes when Ana works on a Saturday or Sunday she takes her into work and lets her sit there and wait for her. That's if she doesn't have to hang out with that lame-arse Franklin, who's so old and just decrepit. Ugh. So it's so much better for Yvetta if she's goes into work with her mum, and just texts and emails me and stuff. I think she even met her boyfriend in there one afternoon. His name's Dustin, and he's 18 and works in the butchery department at the Countdown on Dominion Road, and he flats in Grafton. Of course Yvetta thinks she's better than me because she's got a boyfriend and I haven't, but I don't think Dustin is all THAT wonderful. I mean, he's kind of stupid if you talk to him, which is possibly why he didn't finish school, but he does have a car. The car is kind of cool, because it means he takes Yvetta out places, like into town on a Saturday night, which is better than just hanging around home. I hate hanging around at home.

Although at the moment, I'm in charge of everyone. Kind of. Mum and Dad have gone to get Pam's birthday present, which is a cupcake maker. Seems like a dumb present to me, but she's wanted one for, like, forever, even though Mum keeps saying you can just make cupcakes in the oven. Pam went to Dad though. She _always_ goes to Dad and he just caves. Yvetta says that's the best thing about having a step-dad, is the fact they think they have to buy you stuff to make up for the fact you're, like, second-best or something. Although I don't know how that works with Pam. Maybe with her it's to make up for the fact that she was obviously a total mistake. No one else's mum had a baby when she was that old.

But Yvetta's step-dad, Creepy Franklin bought her this really cool iPad, when it wasn't even her birthday or anything. It must be great being an only child and not getting the 'if I buy it for you, I have to buy it for everyone' speech all the time. I'm SO sick of that. Although I think Yvetta said that she needed it for school, so that probably helped her get it. I think she left it in Dustin's car, though, and it got mixed up with his friend's stuff…or something like that. Because she hasn't had it for a while, she's just had her phone for sending me stuff. But Franklin is getting her a new phone for her birthday, so she's still really lucky.

Maybe though if I do a really good job at looking after the kids today, I'll be able to babysit, for actual money. That'd be cool. 'Cos then I could buy some decent clothes, and not have to shop at crappy old Farmers and Kmart and all the places Mum likes to go because they're cheap. She just does it to piss me off, I think, because it's not like we're THAT poor. Well, we wouldn't be, if she'd just stopped having kids like a normal person would. It's just SO embarrassing that everyone knows that she's at it all the time, like when Ana said to me "Oh, your mama she can't resist that Eric, can she? What with all the babies in your family? Must be noisy at night in your house, huh?" And then she, like, winked at me and I didn't know what to do, because I don't want to think about _them_ having…sex. Ugh. It's just _awful._ They're so old, and just shouldn't be allowed to go within three metres of each other, but they're sooo bad at groping each other. It really puts me off my dinner sometimes.

Yvetta reckons she's going to have sex with Dustin, but I think she'll chicken out. She said she's already done it, with this other boy who she says she knew from her old school, but I don't think she really did. She's always, like, super-vague about the details and keeps telling me that "Oh, well you'll find out when you, like, find someone who wants to do you", but I think she just doesn't know as much as she says she does, but when I asked her once, like, what this guy's name is she got all pissed off with me and wouldn't talk to me for a week and it was really lonely because the other girls at school are all really snobby and look down on me and Yvetta, because they're all from like, really posh schools. Even though our school is meant to be a public one, it's still in a good area and everyone seems to have a lot of money and, like, really flash stuff. And their parents have great cars. Mum has the worst car in the entire world and I hope she never thinks it's OK to come and pick me up, because that really wouldn't be OK.

So I was standing in the kitchen, trying to work out what I should do, because, you know, I was in charge, when Felicia came in. Sometimes I really wish Mum hadn't bothered having her.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Watching dinner" I said, although I thought it was pretty obvious really.

"Yeah, I don't think you actually have to stand there and really watch it. It's just lasagne. You know, it's cooking, so we're OK" Felicia said, trying to be all sarcastic, but really, she just sounds like a kid. 'Cos she is.

"Just don't worry about what I'm doing" I said. "You go and do your homework or something."

"You're not the boss of me" Felicia said, because really, when was she not a bitch? Honestly, she thought she was so special, and she wasn't. She was just an annoying little sister. I think I liked Pam better.

"I'm looking after you! Because I'm fourteen, and you're just eleven and you're not _allowed_ to be home alone, because you might do something dumb."

"Yeah, you're the one who does dumb things. You and Yvetta do nothing but dumb things. You just wander around St Luke's following boys and shit like that. It's so boring!"

"So? All you want to do is run around a stupid field. That's just pointless." God she was annoying.

"You could try it some time" Felicia said, coming a step closer and putting her hands on her hips. "It might be good for you to get some exercise, rather than just sitting around on your bum texting."

"Fuck off!" God, she was _such_ a little bitch! Yvetta was totally right about Leesh, she should just be locked in her room until she grows up. "You're not supposed to bully people!"

Felicia shrugged in that really annoying way that she just thinks is cool because Eric does it and she, like worships him, although I'm pretty sure he likes Pam more than her and it serves her bloody right. "I'm not bullying you" she said, like I was just making it up, when I wasn't and she was just being all bitchy because she's stuck being a kid when I'm practically a grown-up. "I'm just pointing out your arse'll thank you for a bit of a run around and a few less trips to the Foodcourt. That is all." She gave me this look, like she was just waiting for me to lose it and scream at her, but I didn't want to give her the satisfaction. Plus, I didn't want her telling Eric that I was all, like, yelling and stuff when I was in charge, because she just tells him everything.

So I just said "You can shut up right now, Felicia, because I'm not interested."

"You shut up!" she said, because of course, she can't just shut up. Such a big-mouth!

Sam came in and said "Both of you shut-up", which was just, inappropriate, because he's not in charge AT ALL.

"You're not Dad, so don't say shit like that to me" Felicia said, turning around to face him.

"Well you're not in charge, so you don't get to be the boss" Sam said.

"You want her to boss you?" Felicia said, pointing to me in a really rude way.

"I don't think I need anyone to boss me" Sam said, opening the pantry door. Well, he wasn't allowed to eat anything, because it was nearly dinner.

"You can't have anything" I said to him. "Because you'll spoil your dinner."

"You're not Mum" Sam said from inside the pantry.

"It doesn't matter!" I spat out, and I was seriously starting to get close to losing it now, because, for God's sake, why did I have to get stuck with such a bunch of whining, ungrateful little kids. It was horrible. There had to be laws about using your children for slavery like this. I hadn't given birth to them! I shouldn't have to be in charge of making sure they didn't stuff their face with biscuits.

"What's happening?" Tray asked.

"Oh, aliens came and scooped out Amelia's brain and filled her head with shit, and now she's got shit for brains" Felicia said to him.

"I do not!" I said to her, and really, that was pretty nasty. See, she wouldn't say stuff like that if Mum was around, or even Dad, but she thinks it's OK to say to me because they're not here. "Stop laughing Tray!" I said to him, but he didn't. Little shit.

"You are SO horrible" I said to her. "No wonder you don't have any friends." Yeah, that was pretty nasty, but she started it. And it was true. She didn't have a best friend like I did, and I knew it made her sooo jealous.

But she tried to play it really cool. "Yeah, whatever Ames. Like I'd want to hang out with Yvetta Slut-pants McFart-Fart like you do. If you've got shit for brains, she's got dead air in her skull."

Tray had started giggling at the bit where Felicia said fart, and Sam, who was now eating biscuits like he really wasn't allowed to, stood there and sniggered too. They were both little shits.

"Don't eat those!" I said, taking the container off Sam. "You'll spoil dinner and then Mum'll be upset." Yeah the best way to get to Sam was to tell him he'd upset Mum. He just loooved Mum. It was kind of weird and creepy. But then all my family were weird. I didn't know how I'd ended up so normal. It must be from my real dad's side, or something. I mean, Nana was OK, if a bit funny about food. Maybe I was like her, and that'd be OK because I didn't think I was like anyone else in this stupid house.

God, I couldn't wait until I left home. Yvetta and I were going flatting as soon as we got into Uni, although she was thinking that maybe she'd work instead for a couple of years, and I could see how that would be good, like getting money and stuff, but I didn't know. I mean, I didn't really care what Mum and Eric thought, but they kind of always assumed I'd go to Uni, and I had too, because I really wanted to do this Communications course and I was going to work in PR and it would be really great going to all the parties and stuff, but maybe I could just start as an office junior or something? I had to get NCEA though, first, and then like see what was best. So really the more money I could save now, the better. So I needed the babysitting, and I wouldn't get to do it again if all of this lot were really naughty.

"You're psycho" Sam muttered.

"Yeah, you don't even know what that means" I said, putting the container back in the pantry and closing the door. I wondered if I needed to guard it from the boys. Maybe if I got Pam to just play Barbies in front of it then they wouldn't be able to get it open without hitting Pam with the door, and then she'd tell Dad, so they wouldn't, or, if they did do it and hit her, they'd get in serious trouble, and it wouldn't have been anything to do with me. Yeah, maybe I'd do that.

"Yeah I do" Sam said. "It's like crazy in a fucking major way. 'Cos Dad said that woman up the road who yelled at Ivan when he got out was fucking psycho, but probably only because her husband only lets her out to go to the shops."

"Dad doesn't know everything" I pointed out, and that was true, because Mum said it all the time. But then maybe she didn't know everything either. Although…she wasn't, like, foreign…so probably that made her…oh I didn't know. But sometimes Dad, or Eric as he was really and I had to keep remembering to call him that now I was an adult because I didn't have to call my step-dad, Dad. Yvetta said that and she called Franklin, Frank all the time. So, anyway, _Eric_ always thought he was so, like, super-special and right about everything so possibly he was just being a pain in the bum like Felicia and Sam and Tray were right now.

God I hated my family.

"Where's Dad?" Pam asked, walking into the kitchen.

"Remember they went out" I said. "So it's OK, sweetie. I'm here and I'll look after you." Yeah, Pam was my favourite.

But she could be a little shit too. She just rolled her eyes and said "Like that'll work" and stomped off. I had half a mind not to buy her anything for her birthday. She got enough stuff as it was.

"Wow, you really suck at being in charge, Ames" Felicia said. "Even Pam thinks you suck and she's only four."

"Yeah?" I said, getting really fed up with how selfish and stupid they all were. "Yeah, well you really suck. You all suck! And you're just jealous that I'm in charge and you're all still stuck being kids, because I get to do everything first, and you guys…you guys just…you suck!"

And of course, because my life is shit and my family pick the worst times for everything, that's when Mum and Dad walked into the kitchen.

God, I still hoped they let me stay at Yvetta's on Saturday night.

SPOV

"You're sure she really wants the cupcake maker?" I asked Eric. We were standing in the homewares section of Farmers in St Luke's, gazing at the boxes of cupcake makers which were, apparently, Pam's pick for her birthday present. I could kind of see the appeal to Pam, because, if the picture on the box was to be believed, what was inside would create a plethora of beautiful cupcakes with pastel icing. And I could kind of even see the appeal to Eric, because the thing plugged in and therefore somehow managed to make it onto his radar as an 'appliance'. But I was buggered if I could see the appeal myself. You could just make cupcakes in the oven. This didn't seem to add anything much to that process.

"This is what she wants" he said. "She showed me again the other week, and I got promised cupcakes every week if I convinced you to get it for her for her birthday."

"I don't see why I'm the bad guy" I grumbled.

"Because you're the one who needs convincing. I'm the one who sees her point."

"Yeah, but it'll end up in the kitchen, taking up valuable space. Space I could use for something else. Like, I don't know, biscuits or something."

"Cookies."

"Maybe I would have let you get some of them, too. Maybe I would have looked up cookie recipes from an American website and made them for you, but you'll never know if the space is taken up with a cupcake maker. You don't even really like Pam's cupcakes, you find the coloured icing off-putting and you hate the crunchy sprinkles."

Eric shrugged. He might not be that keen on the cupcakes, but he did love Pam. "Fine" I said, "Grab one and let's move on. We need to find something for a wedding present for Hunter and Jenny." Hunter was getting married in a couple of weeks and I was already starting to steel myself for facing my extended family.

Eric sighed. "Do we have to? Couldn't we like, pick from the registry? On-line?" Yeah, see normally I did this kind of stuff by myself, because if I had Eric with me, I'd have the kids too. So he got out of present-buying. But we'd left Amelia in charge, figuring an hour or so before dinner would be a good trial run, and I had him all to myself.

"No, we'll get something while we're here. And then it's done and I know it's done and I don't have to worry about how long it'll take to get delivered" I said to him.

Eric looked at his watch. "Maybe we should go home and make sure they're all OK?" I gave him a look, because when I'd posed a question about how they were all faring in our absence about twenty minutes earlier, he'd pooh-poohed me because at that stage, we were still sitting in a café drinking the coffee he'd talked me into buying.

"Well, I just thought…" Eric said huffily, catching my look.

"I'm sure they'll be fine" I said, more because I wanted to buy the wedding present now rather than because I actually thought it was the truth. I didn't think they would have burnt the house down, because I'd set the oven on a pretty low temperature and told Amelia to keep an eye on it for me, but I wondered if they were all just fighting amongst themselves. I couldn't see Felicia taking too kindly to Amelia's new-won authority.

"Well, if you really want to" Eric said, like I made up the rules about having to bring a present to a wedding just to spite him.

"It's more that we really need to. So, any suggestions?" I said, looking hopelessly around. I hated it when people who were already living together got married. And it didn't feel right doing that whole 'contribute money to the honeymoon fund by depositing it into this bank account' thing that people sometimes asked you for these days. It didn't feel like a real, tangible gift. Something they'd look at in a few years' time and it would make them remember their wedding day and the fact that you were there with them. So it had to be a thing.

"I don't fucking know" Eric muttered. "This is…kind of not my department" he said, as if that excused him.

"I'm sorry" I snapped. "I thought this was a partnership, not a bureaucracy."

"Wow. Pissy" Eric said. "So is Amelia going to be over her moods by the time she's your age or should I just try and marry her off to some poor sucker now so she can stop being our problem?"

I took a deep breath in and then let it out. "Yeah" I said. "Sorry. I'm just a bit worried about her. And being so wrapped up in Yvetta. I said if she does a good job tonight she can stay at Yvetta's on Saturday night, but I don't really want her to. I don't trust that Ana Lyudmila not to just go into work and leave the pair of them roaming the streets of Auckland for that night."

Eric shrugged. "Well…not much we can do about it if she does."

"We could stop her going."

"And live with her after that? No, I think I'd definitely be marrying her off if I had to listen to that amount of whining and stomping."

"We might get the silent treatment" I pointed out, while looking at a selection of platters.

"The silent treatment comes with slamming doors and a lot of yelling at her siblings though" Eric said, picking up a jug and discarding it pretty quickly. "I'd have to find a deaf guy to take her off our hands. What kind of shit do they want anyway?"

"Nice shit" I said. "Shit they can put on display and be proud of."

"Coffeemaker?" Eric asked, looking back longingly towards the appliances.

"Well, that's what you would want" I said. "But I don't know that it's what Hunter and Jenny really want."

"If my name is going on the card, I don't want the gift to be any of this shit" Eric said, waving an arm at a display of Corningware.

"Fine" I said. "Let's go look at the coffeemakers."

EPOV

It was nice being out with Sookie and without the kids, but fucking annoying that we had to spend the whole time buying gifts. Getting Pam's cupcake maker wasn't so bad, because she'd wanted it for months and I'd pretty much already said to her that it was a done deal as long as she kept on behaving. Sure enough her sticker-chart had been pretty immaculate ever since. But having to buy a gift for that kid Hunter and some chick I didn't know was like a special kind of hell. A hell containing many of those big plates with flower patterns, and casserole dishes without any actual casserole in them, which didn't interest me in the slightest.

But there wasn't any point fighting it, it was just a matter of trying to find something that wasn't too lame, and getting out without being roped into looking at anything else fucking boring. Of course it might have been nice if Sookie and I had been able to have dinner together afterwards, but there was no way she was leaving Amelia in charge for that amount of time and I was inclined to agree. I thought she could cope, but this was the test and we needed to get back and see what the verdict was.

On the way home though, Sookie returned to her current favourite topic of conversation, Amelia. "I just wish there was a way to steer her through it all, without having her think I'm interfering. I just can't remember what Mum did for me. I didn't have an Yvetta for one thing, only Tara, and it's just lucky that she wasn't anywhere near as…as, well, as kind of forthright as Yvetta is or else I could have been in trouble, because Tara talked me into doing a lot of stuff with her, but nothing really bad. We weren't sneaking out at night. And there was no internet of course, so I wasn't watching anything dodgy. Well, maybe _Fatal Attraction_ on video when I was about 13, but that was it. So…I don't know."

I didn't know either, but I'd kind of already covered that with Sookie. "She'll figure it out" I said. "After all, you don't see many adults still sneaking around and doing shit their parents wouldn't like." I thought that kind of summed it up, but when I glanced at Sookie, she just looked pale. "What?" I asked.

"That sounds _exactly_ like the stuff Bill did" she whispered.

"I don't think that kind of thing is genetic" I said. If it was, I was up shit creek.

"Yeah…but. I just don't want her falling into patterns now that she'll find it hard to get out of later on. Like you know, doing stupid stuff when things are tough because that's the only way she knows how to cope." And that sounded like me. Yeah, from Sookie's point of view, Amelia was fucking doomed, either nurture or nature was going to get her in the end.

"Maybe" I tried, "We should just wait and see what happens for a bit before we decide she's lost to us forever."

"Yeah" Sookie said quietly. "You're probably right."

We got home to find the house still standing, everyone in one piece, but some kind of stand-off going on in the kitchen. The main culprits seemed to be Amelia and Felicia, with the boys kind of cheering them on. That would be my guess, anyway.

"Everything OK?" I asked, looking around as Amelia just stared at me.

"Yep, we're OK. The commandant here let us out for exercise and everything" Felicia said, a bit spitefully.

"Shut up" Amelia muttered. Sam looked from one to the other. "I'm good" he said. "I didn't do anything."

Sookie had gone to check the dinner that was in the oven and didn't really look at the kids. Yeah she was still fucking worried about Amelia.

"You farted" Tray said to Sam.

"That was hours ago" Sam said. "And you can talk." Tray shrugged and looked around waiting to see what would happen next.

"OK" Sookie said, "Everyone get cleaned up, I'm about to serve dinner."

Sam and Tray ran off, and Felicia followed them. Amelia took one long look at Sookie and then left as well. Pam ran in and yelled "Daddy!" and threw herself at me.

"Did you get it?" she whispered, as I lifted her up.

"That would be telling" I whispered back. I may have winked at her though.

SPOV

After dinner Amelia finally came and spoke to me. "So…that was OK?" she asked. "You know. I passed…and everything?" she sounded almost back to her normal self, which was a welcome relief. I knew it was only because she knew I was holding the night at Yvetta's over her head, but I wished it would last.

"Yeah" I said. "Thank-you. They weren't too much trouble?"

"Oh no. No, they pretty much get that I'm the eldest and stuff" Amelia said, looking around and down and not at me. "So I can go then? On Saturday night? To Yvetta's?"

"Yeah, I guess" I said. "Although I need to talk to her mum and check it's all OK."

"We're not kids" Amelia grumbled, and then she stopped, checking herself. I guess she didn't want to ruin it for herself now by being rude. "You can ring her in the morning" she said.

"Yeah, I will" I told Amelia. She stood there for a moment, and I wanted to ask if there was anything she wanted to talk about, but I didn't think that was in the new rules for our relationship that we were trying to work out. In the end she just left the room and I went back to my original task of trying to load the washing machine.

At bedtime though, when I came out of the ensuite, Eric decided to ambush me as well. Except it was more like he'd disappeared because when I'd gone in he'd been sitting on the bed reading and watching the news at the same time, and now he wasn't there, which was confusing. I must have stopped there, looking at the bed, and it was only when he said "Sookie", that I figured out to turn my head and locate him. He was sitting on the old nursing chair. Naked.

We didn't have much use for the nursing chair these days. At least, not as a nursing chair. But we kept it in the bedroom so Eric's little pile of half-worn but not quite ready for the wash clothes didn't end up in a pile on the floor. A pile on a chair was so much classier, after all.

Also, of course, it was there for sex. Like just about everything else in this house, at least according to Eric Northman, although I had yet to be persuaded about the dryer which we'd replaced about a year ago. Sex on a dryer seemed a bit porny. Sex on the chair, well, that was pretty good. As long as I didn't look at Eric's pile of clothes which were now in a heap on the floor next to the chair.

"Oh" I said. "You moved."

"Yep" Eric said. "Come over here and I'll cheer you up." He sounded pretty cheerful himself, and he looked reasonably cheerful too.

"How do you know sex is going to cheer me up?" I asked, putting one hand on my hip.

"Well, I don't for sure" Eric said thoughtfully. "So let's just do it, as a kind of test. Like putting Amelia in charge today. That worked out alright. I have a feeling this might too."

"And you want to put that hypothesis to the test?" I said, taking a step closer to Eric.

"I want to put something somewhere" he said, reaching out and grabbing my hands to pull me closer. "I think you'll like what I have in mind."

"OK, but we'll have to be quiet" I said to him.

"I can be quiet" Eric said, as I climbed onto his lap and he lifted my tank top.

"No you can't" I scoffed, as he grabbed my boob and went in to nuzzle my neck.

"I can. I'll prove it" Eric said.

He was, maybe, slightly quieter. It was hard to tell without one of those things that measure decibels. But it did cheer me up. "Oh, that's so good" I murmured, as I sank onto him and rocked my hips. It was even better when we got a nice rhythm going utilising the rocking motion of the chair.

"Well you look more cheerful" Eric said when we'd finished and I was still straddling him, waiting for my heart-rate to return to normal. "But then… you always do. I like that. I like that you smile at me."

"If there was someone else in here to smile at, it would be kind of awkward" I pointed out, and Eric laughed.

"Yeah…I just meant…you know" he said, not very eloquently.

"I do" I said. "It's like…it's like coming home. Still. Even though our kids think we're over the hill now."

Eric chuckled. "It is like coming home, and I really like the coming." He nuzzled my neck in the spot where I was a bit ticklish, and I giggled and swatted his back. I just hoped this was what Amelia got one day. That for all she thought there was better stuff out there, she realised that the best things in life, while they were at home. With the people you loved.

APOV

Felicia came into my room just before I turned out my light for the night. Yvetta had just texted to say she was going to sleep, so there was no point me sitting up any longer I figured.

"How come you're still up?" I asked Felicia. "Shouldn't you be asleep by now? You know, at your age?"

She rolled her eyes and sat on the bed. "I can't sleep and you know why" she said. "I don't know what's worse, the moaning, the whispering, the giggling or the bit where Dad swears. It's all just _awful._" She looked at me and I did feel kind of sorry for her. It was a bit crappy having her bedroom and having to listen to Mum and Dad all the time. Felicia was a light sleeper anyway, and she hated hearing them. But she'd tried to tell them and Mum looked affronted and Dad looked annoyed, so she'd given up.

"Yeah" I said. "They're…well. It's kind of gross."

"So gross" Felicia said. "So really very gross."

"They're so old" I added.

"They are" she agreed. "Aren't women supposed to dry up or something? When's that going to happen to Mum?"

I shrugged. I didn't know. "Soon. Maybe" I said. "Or maybe they'll just realise they're old and give it up."

"I fucking hope so" Felicia said, standing up and heading towards the door.

"Me too" I agreed, as she walked out of the room.

**A/N NCEA is the national qualification for secondary school students.**

**Thanks for reading! See you all back here in November!**


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N Hello! Back from my holiday, which was mostly lovely although my husband being diagnosed with pneumonia at the beginning of it I could have done without. It's taken me a while to get back into the swing of writing, not helped by the toddler who now has a chest and two ear infections. Yay. And a weird game I have to participate in which involves three teaspoons being laid out repeatedly on the coffeetable. No, I don't get it either. **

**Disclaimer: They're simply not sick and germy enough to have originated from anywhere in my vicinity!**

EPOV

Saturday morning wasn't exactly going well and I didn't have particularly high hopes for it getting any better. Not with the plans Sookie had for the morning. No one was that thrilled with the plans Sookie had for the morning. Except, perhaps for Pam, but even she wasn't above making things fucking difficult.

I'd been put in charge making sure all the kids were ready to go out, which was a chore that basically just required giving a lot of instructions, and then being prepared to give them again when no one followed them. I figured it was kind of like being a drill sergeant or something. At any rate, it was a pretty fucking thankless task. "Pam. Brush your teeth" I said as she walked past.

"No" she said, barely glancing in my direction. Fuck, she wasn't even five yet, if she was going to turn into another Amelia already I was fucking leaving home.

"Pam" I warned. "You have to brush your teeth."

Pam stopped and actually looked at me. "No I don't" she said. "It's a zecutib 'cision. I don't want to."

"Pam you cannot make an executive decision to not brush your teeth. It is non-negotiable."

Pam looked a bit shocked. "No, that's wrong" she argued. "I don't…what's non-go-shable?"

"It means you do it, and you do it now without arguing."

"No, you made that up. You made up zecutib 'cisions too, because you're the only one who can do them" she grumbled.

"Yep, I am. So now go and brush your teeth and we can fucking get out of here."

Pam wandered off down the hall, muttering things under her breath that I probably didn't want to hear. Felicia appeared from the opposite direction, clutching her phone and intent on the game she was playing on it.

"Felicia, you need to lose the pyjamas pronto" I said, and, after she nearly walked into me, she looked up. "What?" she asked.

"You didn't hear what I said?" I asked her and she shrugged, which could have meant any fucking thing.

"Get some clothes on" I said to her. "We're leaving soon."

"Fine" she sighed and she continued off still glued to her phone. I hoped that the fact she walked towards the kitchen rather than her bedroom meant that she was ultimately headed for the laundry room to find clean clothes and not because she was blatantly ignoring me.

Sam and Tray were mostly ready but that didn't stop them complaining about having to go in the first place. "The shops are really boring" Sam announced. "I don't want to go."

"I get that, but there's no choice." If I was going, everyone was going. That only seemed fair. "So put your shoes on."

Sam just stood there. "They don't, um…fit that well…" he finally admitted.

"See? And that is why we're going shopping. Tray, do yours fit?"

Tray looked thoughtful and I waited for an answer, but it didn't come particularly fast. "Dunno" he said in the end. Tray tended to go with the theory that shoes were mostly optional anyway and should be saved for special occasions.

"Well, wear Sam's if they don't" I told him.

"What do I do?" Sam asked.

Fuck, I didn't know. I didn't want to be in charge of everyone's footwear. I seemed to have morphed from drill sergeant to fashion advisor. "Wear Felicia's" I advised him. That made sense to me, we'd just keep passing the stuff down, but Sam opened his mouth to protest. Before he could say anything though, Sookie breezed past us carrying a basket of clean laundry. "That won't work" she informed me. "They're about the same size now."

Well, fuck that stumped me. "Wear your Crocs or your jandals or something, where it doesn't matter if your feet don't quite fit into them" Sookie advised Sam. "We've got to buy Pam her shoes for school, so we'll do everyone at the same time. Well, everyone who needs some. I think Felicia's OK."

Sam shrugged and walked off without further protest. I could fucking bet, though, if I'd come up with that solution he'd want to argue the point with me. For some reason if Sookie said it, it was OK in his book.

Sookie left us and Tray just stood there. "You need to get ready too Tray" I reminded him.

"Oh. Yeah" he said, and he slowly walked off. I didn't have high hopes.

Sookie came back. "Seen Amelia?" she asked me.

"Nope." Most likely that meant Amelia was sitting in her room, reading something ridiculous and hiding from us all. That was preferable to stomping and yelling, of course. But she was kind of on her best behaviour because she still wanted her sleep-over with Yvetta that night.

Sookie sighed. "I'll go get her, you round everyone else up."

"OK" I agreed and set about finding where everyone else had disappeared to. Pam had, at least I think she had, brushed her teeth. Sam and Tray seemed to have shoes, although I didn't want to enquire about their nominal ownership, and Felicia had changed. Kind of. The top was still the same, and she still had those fluffy Ugg-boot things on, but she had jeans on now. That would fucking do. I wasn't about to start the whole fucking process all over again.

"OK. Everybody, in the car. Now." There was a collective sigh, and some muttering as they all started out the door and down the front steps. Possibly there was some pushing and shoving. Pam said "That's my foot, Tray!" Tray sniggered. Felicia swatted him in the back of the head and he turned around and tried to push her, but she crossed her arms and just glared at him, so he gave up and tried to trip Pam up again. Pam said "Bugger off!" reasonably loudly, and got hushed by Sam. Pam glared at Sam. Felicia tried swatting Sam, but he dodged her and laughed, which made her more determined and she ended up chasing him around Sookie's car trying to catch him. Ivan came bounding down the steps and tried to join in, so I had to haul him back inside. Tray complained that the trip would be more fun if Ivan came too. Pam complained that all Ivan ever did was drool on her when he was in the car. Felicia said it couldn't be worse than Sam and Tray's drool. Sam swung at Felicia, but caught Tray and a mini brawl ensued involving all of them.

"Are they not in the car yet?" Sookie asked from behind me. "And…and…why are all they fighting? You're not stopping them?"

"Well" I said, as I watched Tray trying to put Sam in a headlock and failing. He was close though. Another year or so and Sam might be in trouble. "I figured if they got it out of their system now, maybe we'd be OK in the stores later on."

"Um, OK" Sookie said. "Well, it's a theory I guess." Her tone of voice suggested she didn't think it was a good theory, but fuck it. I thought it was fairly sound. They were going to fight one way or another and pulling them all apart in the middle of Kmart wasn't my idea of a fucking good time.

"Hey! Stop that right now!" Sookie said, walking towards the car. Sam actually did, because it was Sookie telling them to, but he was the only one. It wasn't his best choice because Felicia took the opportunity to kick him in the back of the knee. That made him forget about Sookie and turn his attention back to Felicia. "I said stop!" Sookie tried again, but she didn't get much of a response that time.

"Oh for God's sake" Amelia's voice said behind me. "What a bunch of babies. I can't believe I have to go out with this lot." I turned to look at her and she quickly looked down, remembering the whole wanting to go to Yvetta's house thing. I decided to leave her for the moment and just try to calm the others.

"OK" I said, loudly enough to get their attention. "Anyone who isn't in that fucking car and keeping their hands to themselves in 30 seconds is spending the afternoon vacuuming their bedroom and everyone else's." There was an immediate decrease in tension and a scrambled hurry to get in the door of the car, which resulted in a bit of shoving and Pam saying "That's NOT hands to yourself, Tray", and Felicia saying "Move, move, move!" to someone, but mostly, it got the desired result.

Amelia sighed and walked over to climb in too, and I walked over to Sookie. "OK" I said. "Let's get this fucking done."

SPOV

When we went to the St Luke's mall we were that family. Everyone has seen a version of that family. The one where you wonder why on earth they didn't stop after a normal amount of children like everyone else.

I knew we were that family because I could see it reflected in the expressions of the people who passed us. Usually women, they seemed to find the whole thing less palatable. Although of course, at first they'd see Eric, usually with Pam holding his hand and skipping next to him. That got an expression that mostly read as 'aw!' Then they'd see the boys and you could almost see them thinking what a lovely family. As long as Sam and Tray weren't fighting too obviously that is. Then they'd see Felicia sloping along behind and you'd see their expression change as they started counting kids and they'd look back at Eric with a bit of wonderment, probably trying to work out how early he started having kids. Or whether he was a nanny, and if they could lure him away from his current employers.

Finally they'd spot Amelia and me, probably engaged in yet another argument about why I wasn't taking her into one of those horribly expensive chain stores and spending a fortune on a new skirt. Or top. Or jacket. Or whatever it was she wanted that week. But that was the point when I'd see those women's eyes widen and realisation dawn. All those kids were Eric's. And I was the other half. Oh.

Yeah. Oh. Sometimes I thought that as well, because after all, who the hell has five kids? Obviously we're in some kind of cult or something. I was pretty sure some of the women who passed us in the mall thought that. And if I was really unlucky, I'd see their eyes flick from me, and then back to Eric, probably evaluating how we ended up together.

Definitely a cult thing. Probably he inherited me or something.

Fortunately trips out with all five kids were mostly pretty busy and I didn't get to spend a lot of time thinking about what everyone else was thinking. Well, I had to worry about what the kids were thinking because there was always the possibility that they were thinking about doing something stupid, or mildly dangerous, or just plain annoying.

Eric usually had one thought though. As we walked into St Luke's he glanced towards one of the many coffee places. "Um…I might just…" he started to say.

"No" I said. "We just got here. You can wait. Shoes first, then clothes, then coffee."

"We're buying clothes?" Pam and Sam asked, almost at the same time, but with completely different intonations. I sighed. Now I had to break it to one of them that she probably wasn't getting anything new, and tell the other one that yes, he needed clothes. Winter clothes. I didn't care if he couldn't feel the cold, wearing shorts in the middle of July was ridiculous. Of course it didn't help that sometimes when I asked Eric to make sure they had something warm on I'd find Sam running around outside wearing shorts and a t-shirt and with bare feet, but wearing a woollen hat with ear flaps. It wasn't quite what I meant.

"Well…we'll just see how it goes" I murmured, hoping that would get both Pam and Sam off my back for now. "But shoes first anyway."

Everyone, including Eric, looked a bit grumpy at that, but it was so much easier if we got the most important task at hand out of the way first, before everyone got tired, grumpy, and hungry and started trying to wander off to do their own thing. Well, that was Eric, anyway. Mostly the kids just fought, but at any rate, shoes first was the plan I was sticking to.

"Are we going to Kmart?" Pam asked, almost like she was afraid of the answer. She was holding one of Eric's hands and swinging his arm as she skipped. It made me kind of sad to watch her doing that these days as it used to be Amelia who skipped around St Luke's with us. Now she was shuffling along behind me, with her eyes glued to her phone, only occasionally glancing up to check out the other teenagers around and possibly figure out how she could ditch us.

"No" I said to Pam. "We'll go to the shoe shop beside the bank. Because they're school shoes."

"Oh" Pam said, looking excited.

Amelia sighed and mumbled something and Felicia did something I didn't catch which made Tray stumble into Sam. I turned to look at her. "Are you still wearing your pyjama top?" I asked her.

She shrugged. "Dad said it was OK" she replied.

All I could see of Eric now was his back as he'd walked off at top-speed towards the shoe shop, with Pam trying valiantly to keep up next to him. It was possible he'd said OK, but probably he just hadn't said anything. I wasn't sure he'd have even noticed.

By the time the rest of us caught up to Pam and Eric, Pam was busy browsing the shelves and making her selection, a gleam of happiness in her eyes. It was actually kind of nice buying things for Pam because mostly, she appreciated them as new stuff was few and far between. Amelia on the other hand, not so much. She promptly flopped down on one of the chairs and resumed texting. I assumed she was making plans with Yvetta for that night. I hoped she wasn't planning anything she shouldn't be.

But I had to stop concentrating on Amelia and start concentrating on the members of the family who needed shoes. Pam was fairly easy to make happy, although she would have preferred her school shoes in a colour other than black, I think. Sam was less happy about the process. "Well, these fit. I'll just wear these" he said, holding up his foot and showing me the jandal he was wearing.

"Your heel is over the end of it" I pointed out.

"Yeah…but that's OK" he said.

"It's really not, try these on" I said, handing him a pair of shoes. Amelia came over with something that could only be described as pirate-style boots. Over the knee pirate-style boots. "I like these" she said hopefully, deigning to give me a smile now she needed my credit card.

"Absolutely not" I said to her. "They look…cheap." And I bet they weren't priced that cheaply.

Amelia walked off again muttering to herself, and I turned back to Sam. Eric was busy trying to stop Tray annoying Felicia too much. She was usually pretty laid back with him, but occasionally he'd push her too far and that would be it, she'd retaliate in a blaze of fury and Tray wouldn't know what had hit him. It never stopped him doing it though.

After the shoe shopping it was clothes. "Kmart" I said, as we walked out of the shoe shop and before Eric had time to glance too longingly towards the coffee shop.

By now the kids were really losing enthusiasm and Sam and Felicia chased each other up the travelator to the second floor, nearly knocking someone over in the process. Eric had to corner them at the top and reiterate the rules about watching where you're going and not spoiling anyone else's day, and after that things were relatively calm. Until we'd been in Kmart for about five minutes that is, and then Tray and Sam decided to revolt and just wandered off.

"Where are the boys?" I asked Eric. I'd been trying to persuade Pam she didn't really need all the tops she was currently clutching to her body and had lost track of them. Apparently, so had Eric.

"Huh?" he said, looking up from his phone.

"Boys?" I asked, and Eric looked around, craning to see over the top of one of the displays. "Can't see them" he reported.

"We can't hear them either, so that's something" I said. "No, Pam, you don't need a raincoat. We've got one at home."

"But…" she started to complain, and I held my hand up. Eric walked off, hopefully to round up the boys, and Pam tried another tactic. "If I had _this_ raincoat, it would match the gumboots I've got, which have purple fairies. And see? There's a purple swirl on this raincoat. The other raincoat is green." She said green like that was the worst thing a raincoat could be.

"I like green" Felicia said, which suggested she might have been that raincoat's original owner.

"I don't know" I said. It somehow seemed wrong to buy something we'd have no use for in another year or so. I didn't even know anyone with girls younger than Pam I could pass it on to.

"Please?" Pam asked. "Pretty please?" She gave me the winning smile that always worked on Eric.

"I'll think about it" I said. "But not today, we're not doing raincoats today."

Pam sighed and put the raincoat back. Amelia came over and held up what she'd found. These days she was shopping in the women's section which was a scary thought. "It's all a bit sad here" she said.

"Did you find anything you liked?" I asked.

She held up a batwing jumper in a deep maroon and a black skirt. "That's it?" I asked her. It wasn't exactly a winter wardrobe.

"Sad, like I said" she reiterated.

"Well, go and try them on then" I instructed, and she said "When I get my own money, there's NO way I'm buying anything at this stupid shop" and walked towards the changing rooms. Well, I thought, she'd find out soon enough what it was like to have to stretch your clothing budget. We had an agreement that when she was 15 I'd give her a clothing allowance and she could find her own stuff. I figured it wouldn't be too long before she worked out that $60 for a top from one of those over-priced shops that sold designer surf-wear or something wasn't such a great bargain after all.

"Maybe she'll shop at Farmers?" Pam asked me. Farmers was another department store, but slightly flasher. Well, it was flash in our house anyway.

"Maybe" I agreed, thinking that wasn't really what Amelia had in mind.

Felicia came over with a couple of t-shirts.

"They haven't got long sleeves" I pointed out.

She shrugged. "I don't need long sleeves" she assured me. "That's why my uniform sucks." She held the t-shirts up and I examined them. One was emblazoned with the words 'Fight like a Girl', which seemed an odd thing to promote, and the other had a peace sign on it. They seemed OK, apart from the messages being slightly at odds with each other.

"Yeah" I said. "You can have those." Felicia looked pleased and Pam came over to have a closer look. "Does that one have to be green?" she asked, pointing to the peace sign one.

Felicia shrugged. "There was blue" she said.

"Blue's quite nice" Pam said hopefully.

"I like green" Felicia said again.

"But blue would be nice…for a change" Pam said. Felicia looked thoughtful. "You already have that other green shirt" Pam added. "Blue's good. For a change."

"Yeah…maybe I could get blue" Felicia said, and she wandered off to swap the t-shirt. Pam smiled to herself. I contemplated the fact that although I was pleased to see she'd figured out how to get the hand me down situation to work for her, I wasn't sure just how much I wanted her manipulating her siblings. Poor Tray would never stand a chance.

Eric arrived back with the boys trailing after him. "Where were you?" I asked them.

"Around" Sam said, cryptically. It probably meant they'd been off looking at the video games I wouldn't let them buy because they were too violent.

"Do you want to look at clothes?" I asked, and Sam looked horrified. "No" he said quickly. "Just, um. I'm good."

"I don't think you fit anything from last winter" I pointed out to him.

"But looking's…boring…" he said, breaking eye contact with me and looking at Eric. Sadly, if he thought Eric was going to save him he was a bit mistaken. Eric had the same opinion and was back to looking at his phone.

I sighed. There was no point forcing the issue. As it was Tray was having an imaginary sword-fight with a rack full of sweatshirts. "OK" I said, "You go with Dad and get morning tea and we'll catch up in a bit."

"Cool" Sam said enthusiastically. Eric looked up from his phone and said "Come on. And no fucking fighting" before he walked off without checking they were actually following. It took Tray a few seconds to wind down his fight and realise that he was being left behind, and then he ran off after Sam and Eric.

"I still like the raincoat" Pam said to me.

"I know. But it's just a raincoat. How about…we buy this tunic with fairies on it?"

Pam sighed. "No. They're not pretty fairies" she said. "This one's better." She held up one with a picture of a girl's face on it.

"Fine. If that's what you like" I said to her.

By the time Amelia got back from the changing room, everyone else was pretty much done. I'd grabbed some stuff for Sam and would just have to hope it fitted him. It wasn't like he particularly cared what I dressed him in, which in some ways made it harder, not easier. At least the girls had their own particular tastes. And I got two t-shirts and some track pants for Tray, just because I didn't want him to feel left out, although I seriously doubted he'd even notice this stuff was new. He wore most of Sam's clothes as it was, preferring to see the drawers in their bedroom as communal and not caring at all if stuff was slightly baggy on him. It only caused a problem on the days they were wearing school uniform and you had to break up the fights about whether or not he had the correct school jumper on or not.

When we were through the check-out we walked to the Esquires café to join the others. Eric had already bought himself a coffee, and fluffies for the boys by the look of it, and as we walked up I could see Sam drinking his and then glancing sideways at Eric, like he was trying to study how to sit there and nonchalantly sip his drink while not notice that the waitress who was hovering around was gaping openly. For all that Sam tended to side with me at times, there was a part of him that was really, really interested in figuring out how to actually be like Eric.

Tray didn't have any such concerns. He had steamed milk on his nose and was trying to get Sam to laugh at him.

"All done?" Eric asked as we approached the table and sat down.

"Yeah" I said. "Very nearly done."

EPOV

I wasn't the biggest fan of the shopping trips with all the kids, but I could put up with them, as long as they weren't too long. The problem was, that once Sookie had everyone out with her, she tended to come up with a million other things we needed to do while we were there. And no one ever wanted to do them, and we just had pissed off kids to deal with.

Still, at least we'd got as far as having coffee. Sookie was sitting with the one she'd ordered when I thought I'd better check what else was happening. "Well" she said. "Haircuts."

I looked at Sam who looked like he might run from the table. Yeah, no wonder she'd been keeping this under her hat. "I don't want…" he started to say.

"No choice" I said to him. He was better to just shut up and get it done. He didn't like that answer though, and tried again with Sookie. "Well…" she said, wavering.

"He does need one" I pointed out. "And there's the wedding coming up."

"Yeah" Sookie agreed. "Sorry, mate. Haircut it is." Sam frowned and went back to kicking Tray under the table. Tray had made the mistake of laughing at his predicament, so I pointed out he was getting a haircut too which shut him up.

"I don't want one" Pam said plaintively. Yeah, she'd taken a long time as a baby to get any noticeable hair and now she was intent on growing it long 'like a princess'. Sookie picked up the ends of her hair and examined them. "You're probably OK" she said to Pam and Pam relaxed.

"I'm alright too" Felicia said, looking at something in the distance.

"OK then" Sookie agreed.

Neither of us had really thought to ask Amelia until she piped up. "I want a haircut" she said.

"You do?" Sookie asked incredulously. Amelia's hair had pretty much always been long, and, as much as Sookie complained about it being thick and heavy and hard to manage, she didn't seem inclined to want it cut, and neither did Amelia.

"Well…maybe a trim" Amelia said.

"Oh. Well OK then" Sookie said. I figured that made more sense to her.

We managed to get the kids as far as the chain-shop that did haircuts without losing any of them, although Felicia was still looking around, like she might make a run for it. Thankfully the waiting time wasn't too bad and we took seats in the little waiting area after giving the names of the kids wanting haircuts.

"You could probably do with a haircut too, before the wedding" Sookie said, looking at me.

"I'm good" I said. "Plus I can go to the barber during the week." This place looked kind of shitty really, but it was cheap. And the boys didn't exactly require a lot of styling.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sam give me a look that suggested he didn't know how the fuck I got away with it when he couldn't, but he was shit out of luck. One day he'd get to decide to these things for himself. For now, he was stuck with Sookie's rules.

"It's boring here. When I don't need a haircut" Pam announced. Yeah, now she'd done all the stuff that was interesting to her, she was over the outing.

"Play with the toys" I told her, indicating the red plastic box full of sad looking pieces of plastic that was sitting on the floor next to the water cooler.

Pam gave me a filthy look. "I'm NOT a baby" she hissed at me, like I'd committed some kind of heinous crime for suggesting she might like toys. She did like toys. She had toys she liked all over her fucking room, so I don't know what I did that was so horrible.

"Suit yourself" I said, and Pam huffed again. "They're baby toys" she said. "For babies. I'm not a baby."

I looked at her and she was correct, but on the other hand. Well, she was still kind of my baby. But I'd learned that telling her that was almost as bad as suggesting she play with the toys at the hair-cutting place. It was a fucking brave new world for Pam and I wasn't sure I really liked it all that much.

"I want to spend my gift-card" Pam announced after a moment, just as one of the hairdressers came out and called Sam's name, and he reluctantly followed Sookie over to the chair.

"Not right now" I said to her.

Sookie came back and sat down. "I've been sent away" she said. "So God knows what the finished product will be like. I tried to tell the woman what to do, but Sam'll probably add to it. Like that other time when he practically got all his hair shaved off so it'd be a longer time before he had to do this again."

"Yeah" I agreed. "But at least it was over summer."

"Yep" Sookie agreed, picking up a magazine and flicking through it.

"I could go now?" Pam asked, carrying on our earlier conversation. "Because you don't need me here."

"What do you want to do?" Sookie asked her, leaning across me in the process and giving the guy sitting further down the row of seats of a good view of her cleavage. He might have been mostly reading the paper, but I could see where his eyes flicked. Fucker.

"Spend my gift-card. The one from Uncle Jase and Aunty Crystal" Pam said. It had been a birthday present that had arrived early in the mail. As well as some stationery for school, there'd been a gift-card for the bookstore and Pam was itching to spend it.

"Oh" Sookie said. "Well I guess you could, if your Dad'll take you." She looked at me and I nodded. Sure, it would mean spending half an hour in a store while Pam evaluated three almost-identical colouring-in books, but it wasn't much worse than sitting here doing nothing.

"As long as you'll be OK with the boys" I said to Sookie.

"Yeah, sure. I'll be OK" I said.

As predicted the trip to the bookstore involved a lot of Pam wandering around and looking at things and then discarding them, only to go back to them after looking at something else. After about fifteen minutes I'd just about reached my limit. "Are you done yet?" I asked her.

"Well…" she said. "I really want this magazine, because you get free hair-ties with it…and I just…do you think I should get this?" She held up a book with some knitted animals on the cover. I just hoped it wasn't too boring if I had to read it. I took the book off her and looked at the price on the back cover, and then at the price of the magazine she had as well.

"That's more than the gift-card is for, Pam" I pointed out.

"Oh" she said sadly. "Well…I just really wanted that book. It looks cool."

"Yeah..." I said, turning it over. Knitted owls and giraffes and monkeys didn't look that intriguing to me. "Well, maybe I can make up the shortfall. But don't tell anyone, OK?"

"OK" Pam said happily, taking my hand and practically bouncing on the spot. I walked towards the checkouts holding her choices and she skipped alongside me, still holding my hand. It was nice like this, when she was still my little girl. I just hoped she knew she didn't have to push to grow up too fast, like Amelia was at the moment. Amelia just didn't quite get that her view of adulthood as all fun and no responsibility wasn't the actual fucking way it would be.

But, I still had Pam, who now she had her purchases in their plastic bag was beaming at me and talking a mile a minute about some toys she was going to make. Yeah, hopefully that was a mother-daughter activity.

And I still had Felicia, who seemed mostly inclined to play sport and yell at her brothers. At least she wasn't interested in sparkly vampires or boys or any other shit I had to worry about.

We got back to the hair cutting place and only Sookie and the boys were in the waiting area. As predicted Sam's hair was now incredibly short, but it looked better than the over-grown look he was sporting before. He and Tray were involved in some kind of video game the store had set up and Sookie had her nose in a magazine.

"How'd it go?" she asked, as I sat down next to her.

"Fine" I said.

"Look what I got, Mum!" Pam said excitedly, pulling the book out of the bag. Sookie took it from her, frowned, turned it over, frowned some more. She flicked through the pages, looked at me, looked back down and pressed her lips together, before finally closing the book and handing it back to Pam. "Um…OK" Sookie said in the end, giving me another glance. I wondered what the fuck was wrong with the book. It seemed pretty harmless to me.

"We can make the kitty and the puppy and maybe the bunny!" Pam said. Make? Oh fuck, was that a book of things to make? No wonder Sookie was pissed; she'd be doing arts and crafts every fucking hour of the day now. There wasn't much I could do about it now though. And it had made Pam happy…so, it'd be fine.

Pam wandered off to annoy Sam and Tray as she usually did when they tried to play any video games and Sookie turned to me and hissed "Did you even look at that book?"

"Um, yeah" I said. "It had toys you could make in it. She loves making things. It could be worse."

"It has knitted toys, Eric."

"Yeah" I said. I couldn't see that made much of a difference.

"Do you know how to knit?" Sookie asked me.

I looked at her. "But you…" I started, and Sookie shook her head. "No, I can't knit at all" she said.

"Oh" I said. Fuck, I should have bought her a how-to book about knitting.

"The only person I know who knits" Sookie continued. "Is Lorena."

"Um… maybe she might?" I asked and Sookie scowled. "I doubt it" she replied.

Pam came back. "What?" she asked us.

"Oh, nothing" Sookie said, just as I was about to tell her the book had to go back as it was pretty much fucking useless to us.

"I love my book!" Pam said again.

"But, um. You don't know how to knit?" Sookie asked her, gently.

Pam looked at Sookie. "It's OK" she said. "I'll learn."

"You might, um, need lessons though?" Sookie tried.

"Yeah, but Nana Compton said she'd teach me."

Sookie looked a bit taken aback. "She did?" Sookie asked, looking from Pam to me and back again. This was all fucking news to me so I couldn't shed any light on it.

"Yeah. When she came over for Felicia's birthday. Remember she had her knitting? And she let me hold the wool? So I asked. She looked a bit funny, and she tried to say no, but I asked again and then she said yes. So she'll do it! I'm going to go and see Amelia." With that she skipped off to where I assumed Amelia was having her hair cut behind a bank of mirrors that were blocking our view of her.

"Huh" Sookie said. "Not even Lorena can resist Pam."

"No" I agreed. You had to admire the way she went after stuff she wanted. She was a tenacious little thing, that was for sure.

"Sometimes she's so like you it's not funny" Sookie said to me, and I didn't comment. I wasn't sure if that was a good like me or a bad one, so sometimes it was best to just ignore these things when they were said to you.

At least it was only knitting Pam was interested in, and not boys. So I definitely didn't have to worry about her. Or Felicia.

"Where's Leesh?" I asked Sookie.

"Oh" she said. "She saw a friend and went to talk to them."

I glanced out into the mall and sure enough there was Felicia standing there with some kid I vaguely recognised. Was her from her soccer team? When she'd played in a mixed team a few years back? I hadn't realised she actually really knew him that well, mostly she ignored the boys in the team unless they did something she didn't like and then she screamed at them. Now she played in an all-girls' team and seemed to like that better without, as she put it, "The dumb-asses who think they rule the pitch."

Except she didn't seem to mind this dumb ass. Maybe she did because I saw her punch him in the arm, although not as hard as she punched her brothers. But then I saw him pick up her wrist and look at the woven bracelet she wore on that arm, and she didn't punch him for that. She just kind of looked at him. Fondly.

Oh for fuck's sake, no. It suddenly occurred to me that we might have been worrying about the wrong daughter. For all of Amelia's posturing, I wasn't sure she was actually spending all that much time socialising with anyone other than Yvetta, and I doubted that was going to lead to romance…or…or, whatever. But this, this was something different again. Felicia was laughing and smiling at that kid, who had to be at least two inches shorter than her. It was all just fucking wrong.

I turned to Sookie. "Have you seen that?" I asked her.

"What? Felicia. Yeah, isn't that Charlie?"

"I don't fucking know" I said. "But she's been out there a long time."

Sookie shrugged. "It is kind of boring sitting here." I didn't feel she quite got the gravity of the situation, but before I could say anything else Felicia said goodbye to the kid and walked back inside, heading straight towards Sam. "Do I get a turn, fart-breath?" she said to him, giving him a slight kick in the leg.

"Bugger off" Sam said.

"Nope" Felicia said, sitting next to him and trying to take the controller from him.

"Go away! Anyway, haven't you got a _boyfriend_ to go and annoy?" Sam said, trying to hold onto the controller.

Felicia shrugged. "So what if I do?" she said. "Are you jealous 'cos you want him?"

Poor fucking Sam, he didn't know quite how to reply to that one, and I wasn't sure what to do about it either. She couldn't really mean it, could she? Before I could do or say anything though, Pam skipped over. "Amelia's coming!" she said, as though Amelia finally being finished was a huge fucking deal.

And then Amelia appeared around the mirrors. Her hair was now cut to just below her ears and dead straight. She didn't look 14 anymore, she looked…fuck. She could easily pass for 17. Who knew hair made that much difference?

She turned to the hairdresser behind her. "Thanks, Sonny" she said. "I really love it!" The young Polynesian guy with the shaved head she'd spoken to smiled and gave her a look that suggested he fucking thought she was seventeen too. Fuck, this was all just…fucked.

Sookie looked at me, and widened her eyes, before turning to Amelia. "Wow" she said. "That's really nice Amelia. It's like…um, a Louise Brooks bob, isn't it?" Sookie seemed to be struggling to form words.

Amelia shrugged. "Dunno" she said. "But Sonny thought it would look good, and I was sick of all that hair. This'll be so much easier. Can I get hair-straighteners though? I really need hair-straighteners now?"

"We'll um…we'll see" Sookie said, standing up to go and pay for everyone. Pam followed her and Felicia did too. Sam and Tray were reluctant to leave the game they had going and the kicking match that accompanied it. Fuck, at least I could rely on them.

"If you two aren't out that door in the next 30 seconds" I said to them. "You'll be walking home."

**So jandals are thongs or flip-flops and we use jumper for sweater.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N Well thank you all for the reviews to this story, and just for reading it. I still get a thrill out of other people enjoying these characters, and they're kind of like old friends to me now. **

**Disclaimer: Still not mine.**

SPOV

Eric was kind of quiet on the way home. Well, if you call exploding with the odd outburst of "For fuck's sake, shut the fuck up", or "Tray, if you don't fucking settle down I will be dropping you off at the gas station and you can see if you have any luck getting yourself home", quiet.

So there was something going on there I figured, although I had to admit that no one exactly came out of these shopping trips feeling particularly relaxed and enjoying the company of the other members of the family. I for one felt more like I'd survived some kind of test and I wanted to celebrate the victory that was getting everyone out of the mall in one piece. So I was buggered if I was going to let Eric leave one of the kids at a petrol station after I'd spent the morning deliberately not leaving him behind at the shops.

"Well, at least that's done now" I said brightly, ignoring both the ruckus in the back seats where Amelia was now saying loudly "For God's sake, just act your age you two!" and the fact that Eric was staring straight ahead and pretty much ignoring me, despite the fact we'd stopped at the lights and all he was really looking at was the back of the car in front of us.

"Mmm" Eric said. Maybe I was being optimistic, but I took that for agreement.

"It's good to get it over with before soccer starts. Then we'll lose a fair chunk of Saturday mornings" I continued. This year we'd have not only Felicia and the boys playing, but Pam as well. That meant we'd be back to starting with 8am games, as the little kids went first, and then having to hang around all morning while everyone else played their games. Not to mention the cold, the mud and having to deal with cold, muddy kids at the end of it. Every so often I could persuade Eric to take the kids by himself. He needed to be there to tell the referees they were shit, after all, and I could stay home without anyone much missing me. That was sheer bliss and even if I was cleaning the bathrooms, at least I had a chance of them staying clean for more than five minutes. Sometimes I even sat in the kitchen and had a cup of tea and read the paper. Alone.

But soon, I figured, I'd be getting at least one day a week home alone. When Pam started school it would just be me at home on Fridays. For the first time in over 14 years I would actually be child-free for most of one day. It was such an exciting thought that I tried not to think about it too much for fear of becoming way too giddy and giving Pam a complex. Of course I loved her, but, well, it was her time to be at school now and it was my time to be at home re-organising the linen cupboard and having a sort-through the toys when the kids weren't around to see what I was chucking out or giving away. It was going to be awesome.

What wasn't awesome was Eric's frowny-face and grumpy mood. I sighed. Someone always got grumpy at St Luke's.

"I'm starving" Tray announced from the backseat, and at least two of the other kids told him that he wasn't, he was just a bit hungry. But they kind of shouted it over the top of each other and it sounded a bit garbled. "When's lunch?" Tray whinged.

"Soon" I said. "When we get home."

Tray gave an exaggerated sigh but didn't say anything else, and Eric had obviously decided to let that one slide, which I was thankful for because we'd past the petrol station now and I wasn't sure where else we'd be leaving him.

When we got home I had to forget about Eric and throw myself into getting some lunch together. I put out bread rolls and all the stuff I could find to fill them on the kitchen table and the kids came and surveyed the offering.

"Is that lunch?" Felicia asked.

"Well. Yeah" I said. "You can just make it yourself."

"We couldn't get sushi? And now we're getting this?"

"You got morning tea out. You can't have every meal out"

She sighed, but deigned to sit down. She was getting to be almost as bad as Amelia at times, which was a worrying thought. Plus she'd been off talking to Charlie when we were at the hairdresser's. I think it was fairly innocent. Well, she was only 11, so it had better be. They were probably just friends. Probably Charlie thought of her as another boy, given her penchant for expressing herself through punches. Still, at least she'd stopped biting other kids.

Tray and Sam ate their lunch while expressing themselves through elbowing each other and Pam took the opportunity to explain to all and sundry her plans for the afternoon. "We can do my nails, can't we Amelia?"

Amelia shrugged. She'd been keeping quiet, hoping, I think, that nothing happened that might jeopardise her night at Yvetta's. "I'm not here" she said. "This afternoon. I'm going to be at Yvetta's." Pam looked sad and went back to nibbling at her ham and cheese roll.

"Oh" I said. "Um…what time are we going?" I looked over at Amelia. It was weird to see her with her new haircut. It looked great, but it made her look…well, for one thing, who knew Amelia had cheekbones? Cheekbones like that, anyway. The shorter length and the new blunt fringe really changed the shape of her face. Not to mention the fact she'd been brave enough to part with all her hair like that, in one fell swoop. It was something I'd never had the courage for and, not for the first time in her life, I wondered where the hell Amelia had actually appeared from and why she wasn't more like me if I was the one who actually gave birth to her.

She really was all Compton.

"Uh…can we go after lunch?" Amelia asked, looking at me hopefully.

"Yeah, sure" I said. I figured it wasn't worthwhile prolonging her misery, or mine.

Eric didn't say anything; he just looked from Amelia to me and then frowned. Well, there wasn't much I could do about her going now, we'd agreed and she'd been about as well-behaved as I'd expected when I'd made that the condition. And he'd been the one who'd been all laid-back about her going anyway.

I cleaned up lunch, which had been pretty well picked-over despite the grumblings about it not being exciting enough, and then tried to find Amelia. She was in her room putting stuff into her bag. "Have you got your toothbrush?" I asked her.

"Yes" she said in an annoyed voice.

"Pyjamas?"

"I've got_ everything_!" she exclaimed. "I'll be OK."

"Fine" I said. "I'll just tell Dad we're leaving." Amelia muttered something, and I left the room. But in a full-circuit of the house, I couldn't locate Eric.

"Have you seen Dad?" I asked Tray, who was coming out of the bathroom.

"Dad?" he asked, looking around as though Eric had to be standing around here somewhere. I continued on and found Sam in their room looking at the plastic Kmart bags I'd put in there. "Did you buy me clothes?" he asked.

"Uh-huh. Seen Dad?"

"No, but…I didn't need clothes." He poked one of the bags as though it might explode.

"You did" I informed him. It might have been cute for him to run around naked when he was a three year old, but I wasn't sure it was going to work quite so well these days.

Sam sighed, and stopped poking the bags. "So, you haven't seen him?" I asked again.

"No. I could look though? If you want?" Sam suggested.

"Well, just if you see him, tell him I want to say goodbye."

I left Sam and Tray's room and Eric just about knocked me over in the hall. "Oh" I said. "I'm leaving now. To take Amelia to Yvetta's."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, sounding really distant. "I might, um. Go and sort out my tax stuff. For the accountant."

"OK, well have fun!" I said brightly, but Eric just scowled and walked off. He really hated doing his taxes, and I got the feeling that it wasn't just because he'd moved to a new country and didn't understand the system. I think it was personal grudge he held about handing over any of his money to anyone else, free dental care or no free dental care. Plus of course, he had to pay his accountant for the privilege of being told what to pay the government. I at least escaped that part of it because I made JB do them for me for free; I figured there had to be some benefit for letting him copy off me in our Accounting class in Form Four, all those years ago, and now that he was a fancy tax consultant for a big firm, I expected to see some pay-off.

"Ready?" I asked Amelia, as she came into the hall. She looked a bit grumpy too, and I couldn't figure out why. After all, this was what she wanted.

"Yeah" she said. "Ready."

EPOV

Amelia was determined to be a fucking pain in the ass and there wasn't really anything I could do about it. I'd been worried about what she might be planning since I saw the new fucking haircut. Surely that couldn't have been a spur of the moment decision like she claimed? And if she was planning that, planning a look which made her look old enough to, fuck, I didn't even want to think about it, then I figured she was planning something else as well.

"Yeah?" she said kind of rudely, when I walked into her room. She was zipping up her bag and just about ready to leave.

"I just…um…so have a good time" I said, not really sure how to phrase what I wanted to say. When had it become so hard to deal with Amelia?

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah. Thanks." She didn't exactly sound like she meant the last part.

"Just be careful tonight" I said, boiling what I had to say down to its important message. Well I thought that was the important part, anyway. Amelia thought it was a fucking imposition.

"Oh, for God's sake. Don't suddenly come over all 'I'm the dad and you have to listen' with me. I'm not Pam. And you're NOT my dad." She looked at me, eyes flashing and dared me to say something else. And I wanted to say a lot of fucking things to her just then, but the only thing I could do was leave the room before I said something I'd regret, because I was fucked if I was going to stand there and lose my temper with her when she didn't even give two shits about how I felt or anything I'd done for her in the last ten years. Fuck it.

So I left the room and figured I might as well go and do my taxes. The afternoon couldn't get any shittier.

SPOV

Amelia was quiet in the car on the way to Yvetta's, but I was used to that now. She never really wanted to talk to me these days. I was lame, and boring and no fun. But I tried anyway.

"Your hair does look really good" I said.

"Uh-huh" Amelia agreed.

There was some more silence. "So, um, are you doing anything tonight?"

"Dunno. Might watch a movie or something."

"Well that sounds good" I said, brightly. It sounded like the same thing we'd be doing in Amelia's absence.

"I was going to help Yvetta dye her hair" Amelia volunteered. "She wants it red."

"Oh" I said. "Um…will that work?" Yvetta had some rather harsh blonde streaks already in her hair. I couldn't see putting red over that would be a great idea.

Amelia shrugged. "'S'her hair" she informed me.

I had a thought. "Did you…I mean, are you thinking of changing your hair colour?" After the cut that morning I wasn't sure what Amelia's plans were for her hair.

She shrugged again. "I want it black" she said, and I bit my tongue to stop myself blurting out 'Oh no, don't do that.' I liked it as a nice dark brown with the odd natural high-light, it suited Amelia and I was worried black was just going to look harsh and unnatural.

"But I'm not doing anything tonight" Amelia continued. "I don't want a _home_ dye-job." She sounded kind of sniffy about that.

I glanced at Amelia again. Maybe she could carry off black; she did have that slightly olive complexion after all. And maybe I just wanted to be friends with my daughter and not have her think me lame. "Yeah" I said. "Black would probably look good on you."

The rest of the trip passed in silence until I parked the car in the street outside Ana Lyudmila's terraced house. Parking was always a bit difficult around here, so we were a few houses down, and Amelia looked out the window and sighed loudly, before climbing out of the passenger seat.

I followed her to the front door and Ana Lyudmila answered it, dressed in her usual outfit of what I can only describe as 'mutton dressed as lamb chic'. She always looked kind of like she'd raided Yvetta's wardrobe, although I suspected it was actually the other way around. And maybe Ana Lyudmila's choices wouldn't have looked so bad, except that they tended towards the tight and short end of the spectrum and just…well the kindest way to put it was that they did not do anything for her figure. I mean, it wasn't as though I could claim to be a fashion-plate, and it wasn't as though I had the perfect figure. And I certainly didn't want to be judgemental, but I really wished that Ana Lyudmila would take a more critical look at herself in the mirror. And maybe stop buying everything they tried to sell you in Glassons.

"Oh, Sookie. And Amelia sweetie" Ana Lyudmila said in her accent which was still kind of thick despite the fact she'd lived here for over ten years now.

"Hi" Amelia said, pushing past Ana Lyudmila to go inside. "Bye!" I called out after her, and I got something muttered at me over her shoulder before she disappeared.

"You want to come in, Sookie?" Ana Lyudmila asked, gesturing inside the dark, depressing looking house.

"Uh. No. No thanks, I probably need to get back…" I said.

"Oh. Yeah. The kids! They will be looking for their mama, yes?"

"Yeah. Something like that."

"So many kids!" Ana Lyudmila said, widening her eyes. "I guess your Eric he wanted his own kiddies, yes? Franklin, he wanted me to have them, but I said no. I wanted to keep my figure, and what good was it doing going to the gym if I just balloon with another kiddie?" She not-so-surreptitiously looked at my stomach. "So we decided no, and we just love our little Yvetta anyway. But you, you like all the kiddies. And you like your Eric!" She laughed at that, and I wasn't sure what to do. It was the same old story I always got, I'd obviously been so enthralled I couldn't help but repeatedly fall pregnant because wouldn't Eric have super-sperm? Ana Lyudmila wasn't telling me anything I hadn't heard before.

"Of course if I'd had someone, uh, younger" she continued, "I might have had the babies for him. You don't want him thinking about the babies with someone else, do you?" she said, looking to me for agreement. I wasn't sure what to say. What was Eric going do? Have a baby with someone else and bring it home to me?

"But I only had Franklin, and he was a dirty old man when I got him" she said, and she laughed. "Not like Eric." She shook her head sadly, and then smiled at me brightly. I wanted to tell her if she thought he was so bloody wonderful she was welcome to give him a test-run, because I could pretty much guarantee there'd be tax-induced moodiness when I got home and no amount of sex, baby-producing or otherwise, could really make up for the grumpiness and the complaining and the annual speech about why he didn't think he needed to fund a bunch of people who didn't want to work. In _New Zealand_. As though he might be more inclined to look favourably on welfare for American citizens.

I'd once told Eric I might consider getting a t-shirt made which read 'Eric Northman Rocks my World', but sometimes it was more like he barged through my world, making sure I knew his feelings on any given matter in the process. I idly wondered if 'Eric Northman: Not always the super-fun guy you seem to think he is' was too big a slogan to fit on a t-shirt.

Of course Eric could probably think of something to put on a t-shirt about me too. And I doubted it would be anything as nice as 'Sookie Stackhouse: Pretty Realistic about her Faults'.

"Well...thanks for having Amelia" I said, trying to change the subject. "She's really been looking forward to it."

"Oh, no problem Sookie" Ana Lyudmila said, with a wave of her hand. "The girls, they love it, don't they? All that gossip and doing makeovers and shit like that. Ah, to be young like that again. I'd love it."

Well I wouldn't. Being a teenager sucked. I was much happier being the age I was now. Well, maybe not this _exact_ age, but certainly happier being an adult.

"Well, we can't turn back the clock, can we?" Ana Lyudmila said, sadly. "We have to keep going on, and just hope the Mother Nature is kind. Plus, I am saving for Botox. With any luck, I'll get myself the toyboy soon too!" She laughed again.

"OK, well. I'll leave you to it then" I said, backing away from the door and down the steps. "Just…you know. If she needs us, Amelia can phone."

Ana Lyudmila made a phfft noise. "Ah, we'll be fine, Sookie. You go home and enjoy your kiddies, and your man!"

"Uh-huh. See you." I walked back to the car hoping Amelia wasn't going to pick up anything too unwanted from Ana Lyudmila and bracing myself for Eric's tax-induced grumpiness when I got home.

And he was looking slightly grumpy when I got back, but it wasn't anything to do with taxes. I found him sitting at the kitchen table with Pam. A table that was now covered in scraps of fabric, felt pens, shiny paper, ribbon and every single thing that sat in Pam's craft box by the looks of it. And glitter, lots and lots of glitter.

Pam turned to look at me as I walked in. "We're making a fairy catcher!" she said, excitedly.

"Oh. That's, um. You're going to catch a fairy?"

"Yes!" Pam said, nodding. "Apparently, they're _very_ hard to catch!"

"And these instructions are fucking impossible to follow" Eric muttered. He was staring at a page in the magazine Pam had bought along with her knitting book that morning, and I figured this was why she'd wanted that particular one. She loved the free stuff that came with all the magazines for little girls, but she loved the craft projects too. Eric maybe didn't love them quite so much, but he'd obviously decided to do this one for Pam.

"No, Daddy!" Pam said. "You can't put that on until I've put the sparkly paper on it."

"Oh" Eric said.

"Yeah, if it's not sparkly then the fairies won't come. They love sparkly things. And she'll see the sparkly things and come down, and then we'll catch her."

"Uh-huh" Eric said his eyes still on the page with the instructions.

I figured I'd leave them to it and worry about whether or not Pam was going to be disappointed when there wasn't fairy later on.

I spent the afternoon doing boring chores and didn't see Eric again until it was nearly dinnertime. "How's the fairy-trap?" I asked him.

"Done" Eric said. "We hung it from the lemon tree and it's all good to go."

"Oh" I said. "Is that why I can hear Ivan barking so much?"

"Yep. He hates it." I didn't bother asking why it was hanging from the lemon tree and taunting the poor dog then.

I carried on with what I was doing and Eric just hovered, which was weird. Normally if he was hanging about it was because he was trying to grope me, or maybe eat what was I making, but he wasn't doing either. He was just standing there.

After a while he spoke "What are you making?"

"Flamenco pie" I replied.

"Is that the one with the hashbrowns?"

"Yep" I confirmed, and Eric went back to being quiet. It was deeply weird.

I just about had dinner in the oven when the animals started to arrive for their food. "Fuck off, Edward!" Eric said, as poor Eddie mistook Eric for someone who actually liked him and smooched Eric's leg. Eric yelling didn't put him off though, and he went back for another pass.

"Why do we have so many goddamned stupid fucking cats?" Eric asked me, trying to step out of Eddie's way. Eddie pressed on though, and just put his head down and rubbed it against Eric's shin. Somehow he wasn't getting the message that he was barking totally up the wrong tree. Or whatever the cat equivalent of that was.

"Well at least they don't yell" I pointed out.

"Stan does. When he brings in a dead bird. He fucking yells the place down. It's fucking annoying at two in the fucking morning."

I somehow doubted that Stan's hunting practices were really the source of Eric's problem, so I just let that pass. "You could feed him you know" I pointed out, as I slid the dishes with dinner in them into the oven. Unfortunately these days it was very rare that I made one of anything. There were too many people in the house for that to work.

"He'd still fucking catch birds, Sookie" Eric grumbled.

"No. I meant Eddie. He's here because it's dinner time for him." Sure enough, Eddie was now staring at Eric with huge green eyes which looked both hopeful, and slightly perturbed that he hadn't been smooching the person he thought he had been.

Eric sighed and walked towards the pantry. The movement got Eddie all excited and he ran in front of Eric, which made him kind of stumble, and let loose another string of expletives. It was a good thing that Eddie was unlikely to start repeating any of them.

Eric stayed fairly quiet through dinner, and through the movie, despite Pam spending a long time describing what she'd do if she had her own dragon, while her brothers told her she was far too little to have a dragon and their dragons would eat her dragon and possibly then turn into spaceships to boot.

After they were all in bed I decided to ask him what was going on. But before I could do that, I heard footsteps out on the deck. I pulled the curtains across the doors in our bedroom open and looked out. "It's Pam" I said to Eric. "She's gone out to check the trap."

"Catcher" Eric corrected, without looking up from the book he was reading on the bed.

"Uh-huh. But seriously, I'm a bit worried she expects an actual fairy."

"I'm sure she'll figure it out" Eric said, fairly disinterested.

I looked at Pam standing on the back lawn in her nightie, clutching Mr Fluffy and looking up at the sky. I wasn't so sure.

I opened the door and stepped out onto the deck. "Pam" I called. "Back inside now."

Pam ran across the lawn and up the steps. "But she might come!" she said. "And I want to be here!"

"I don't think any fairies will be out if you're here. They'll be scared of you" I said, cursing myself for getting sucked into the whole thing.

Pam wrinkled her nose. "Well, that's weird" she said. "I'm _not_ that scary."

"Yeah. But back inside now."

Pam went into our room and climbed onto the bed to give Eric another cuddle. "And in the morning" I heard her say, "I'll have a real, live fairy! And she'll be all mine, and Tray and Sam won't have one, and they'll be so jealous."

"Yep, sure Pam" Eric agreed. He wasn't helping matters either.

After escorting Pam back to bed and re-locking the door she'd escaped out, I'd went back to our room. "I'm a bit worried…" I started to say, and Eric looked up sharply. "I think she'll be fine, but she's just testing the boundaries" he said.

"Um…yeah. But I'm not sure the bounds of reality need to be tested by the expectation of a real fairy" I said.

Eric frowned, and then nodded to himself. "Oh" he said. "You're talking about Pam."

"Well, yeah" I said. "I worry that she's going to be really disappointed when all that thing produces is more manic running around and barking from Ivan. We might have to move it."

"Yeah" Eric said, and I realised I'd lost him again. I would have to figure this one out on my own.

While I brushed my teeth I had an idea. I grabbed a bottle of Pam's glitter from her craft box and took it outside. I sprinkled a bit on the fairy trap, and then some on the ground below it. There, I thought. That might do the trick.

I noticed Stan's yellow eyes staring at me from the fence. "Don't even think about walking through this, Stan" I warned. He just stared at me and then walked off. I went back inside to Eric.

"I think I've sorted it" I said. "The fairy thing. I've left a trail of fairy dust, we'll just say that she nearly trapped one, and that might do it."

"Oh" Eric said. "OK."

I climbed into bed beside him and he moved his arm so I could lean against his chest. "So what's the problem?" I asked him.

"Mmm?" Eric asked, still looking at his book.

"Before. You thought I was worried about something other than Pam's weird interest in catching a mythical creature in the back garden."

"Oh, I, uh…well I assumed it would be Amelia. But she'll be fine" Eric said dismissively.

"Yeah, she will. I saw Yvetta's mum there. I don't think she was going to ditch them to go to work, she was maybe going to be their slightly inappropriate friend and spend all night doing their hair, but that's all. And really, what could go wrong?"

EPOV

Well all sorts of fucking things could go wrong, if you asked me. I'd been dwelling on it all afternoon, ever since Amelia's little tirade at me in the bedroom. I'd figured out that maybe it wasn't that much to do with me, and maybe she just wanted to be like her friend with the loser dad who bought his family, but it still didn't feel fucking great. I thought…well, I thought she fucking liked me. I wasn't the shittiest dad out there, that was for fucking sure. But Amelia, well she thought she knew every fucking thing and had such a hard fucking life.

She really, really didn't.

But just because she was going to take all the perceived injustices of her life out on me, maybe that didn't me she'd fall into doing a whole bunch of stupid stuff just to show me what she thought of me. I mean, fuck. Had Melanie Bowen hated her dad? I didn't think so. I was pretty sure he didn't have anything to do with the fact she'd slept with me when we were 15. So it was OK. She'd stomp and she'd yell and she'd be back tomorrow and we could all pretend it had never happened. And I could get Sookie to talk to her, and tell her that she had to fucking behave from now on and stop being such a fucking moody little madam.

Yeah, that'd work. She'd listen to Sookie.

"Nothing" I said to Sookie. "It'll be OK."

"Yep" Sookie said. "She'll be back tomorrow after all, yelling at us all and trying to get me to buy her hair-straighteners. I just can't believe she cut all her hair. Do you think I should cut mine?" She looked at me expectantly.

"No" I said. "No, I like it just how it is."

Sookie pulled a face. "You're just used to it this way. I just…well, it's pretty much always been like this. Maybe it was a bit longer when I was younger, but I never did anything as radical as Amelia has. Now she has cheekbones."

"And she looks about 17" I added. I did kind of worry about that.

"I thought maybe 18" Sookie said. "That's…but she'll be OK."

"She will." I bent over to kiss Sookie and then something landed on the bed with us, so I moved away and looked at that fucking stupid cat sitting there watching us. And then something caught my eye.

"Sookie" I asked. "Why is Edward fucking sparkling?"

"Oh, Eddie! No!" Sookie said, going over to look at him. "That's Pam's fairy dust, it's not for you."

Eddie just blinked at her and then started purring. Fuck, that cat had a screw loose if you asked me.

Of course a few hours later, when my phone rang, I kind of wished that a sparkling fucking cat landing on the bed had been the most memorable part of the evening. Sadly, it fucking wasn't.

**A/N Glassons is one of those chain stores that everyone has, selling the latest fashions, fairly cheaply, and much-beloved of young girls.**

**Flamenco pie is an old recipe I use. It's a layer of frozen hashbrowns, followed by a minced beef mixture (I just throw whatever I have into that), and then topped with grated cheese, carrot and courgette (zuchinni) for a crunchy topping.**

**And if anyone doesn't remember the t-shirt discussion Sookie mentions, it featured in the one-shot Eric Northman is Not Hot!,which is set just before the start of this story.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N So this is all in Amelia's point of view and we can see what she's been up to.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

APOV

I was really, really glad to get out of home. Not just because Mum wanted to twaddle on about hair and other stuff, but mainly because of the conversation I'd had with Eric.

It really sucked the way he just went on at me all the time. Well, maybe not all the time, but he just kept telling me to be careful, and I was nothing but bloody careful. I didn't fight and break stuff and end up with sprained wrists like the rest of the kids in the family, so I didn't really know what his problem was and why he was picking on me.

But he looked kind of funny when I said he wasn't my real dad. And he isn't. And he knows that, because…well, he was there. Or not there. But, he didn't seem to like that when I pointed it out to him. And I felt…well, I felt a bit mean. But I shouldn't, because I'm pretty sure he can take it.

But even so, I didn't want to hang around home anymore. I didn't want to know what he was going to say to me next because he could get really grumpy sometimes. He'd already told Tray he was leaving him at a petrol station that morning and Tray's kind of used to that, and sometimes he'd rather be left somewhere, I think, than have to go with the rest of us. I didn't need Eric threatening me with something horrible.

It was probably lucky he didn't stop me going to Yvetta's.

Yvetta was in her room when I got there. "Hi" I said, and I dropped my bag on the floor. She was looking at something on her laptop, and turned around. And then she frowned.

"Your hair's all short" she said to me.

"Oh, yeah" I said. I'd kind of forgotten about that. I ran my hand over it, which I'd actually been doing a lot. It was really weird when my hair just stopped and all of a sudden I could feel my neck. I mean, I liked it, but it was going to take a bit of getting used to.

Yvetta wrinkled her nose. "Boys don't like short hair" she said.

"It's not really short" I said. "It's…it's a bob. Mum said it's a bob."

"Your mum has long hair" Yvetta pointed out. She was right. Mum'd always had long hair. Really nice long hair _and _she was blonde. So no wonder guys liked her hair. My hair sucked.

Yvetta shrugged. "You could dye it" she said. "Red. Like I'm going to."

I didn't want red hair. "I was thinking about going darker" I said.

Yvetta didn't seem that impressed by that either. "Nah, you'd look all emo and shit. And dreary. That's what my mum says. Guys don't like it if you look dreary. That's why I'm staying blonde, and maybe going red."

I didn't say anything to that. Yvetta wasn't really blonde though, her hair was really brown. And Ana had given her some highlights at home, but they didn't look right and some of them were really too blonde and almost looked grey. But I didn't say that Yvetta, because that would be mean. I knew that some of the other girls at school said it though, but they were all bitches most of the time, so of course they'd say horrible things about Yvetta.

"Isn't Amelia's hair nice?" Ana said as she walked into the room and gave me a big smile. I guessed Mum had left then.

Yvetta shrugged. "It's short. You say guys don't like short hair" Yvetta grumbled.

Ana shrugged. "But it's a nice short, yes? So the boys will like it anyway. Plus your neck looks very long…and, uh. Elegant. You look very elegant, Amelia."

I liked that Ana liked my hair because she was kind of cool, but Yvetta just rolled her eyes. Maybe she was jealous. I was kind of used to the jealousy thing, because it happened all the time at home. I mean, if Dad talked me or something, then I could guarantee that Pam and Felicia would get all shitty and try and butt in on us because they wanted him all themselves.

Although he probably wouldn't be talking to me when I got back home. But that wasn't for, like, another whole day. So maybe he'd be over it. Or the boys would have kicked a hole in the wall in the hallway again and he wouldn't be shitty with me, he'd be shitty with them.

I smiled at Ana. "Mum says she might buy me some hair-straighteners" I said.

"Oh. Well make sure you get the GHDs then, yes? The rest of them, they are shit and they just break, don't they Yvetta?"

"Uh-huh" Yvetta said, but she sounded kind of grumpy.

"That's why I say to Franklin, when he buy me the straighteners. I say 'Franklin, you don't get me the shitty ones, yes? Is no point buying them if they're going to break one day and I get only half my head straight.' So he get me the GHDs and that's much better."

"I don't get to use them" Yvetta mumbled.

"Well, no. They're very expensive, Yvetta. I can't replace them, so they're just for me. You want some; you get your dad to buy them for you. He's got all the money, yes?"

Yvetta didn't reply to that, and I didn't know what to do, so I just stood there for a bit.

"So you happy to stay here the night, Amelia?" Ana asked me. "And hang out with us poor single girls?"

"Uh…yeah" I said, and Ana laughed.

"You not miss your little brothers and sisters too much though, yes? Or your mama? Or daddy?" Ana looked at me expectantly. I wasn't sure what she wanted me to say. Why would I miss my family? My family pretty much sucked.

"No, it's much nicer here, 'cos there's no one screaming and fighting, and usually I have to, like, sort it all out because I'm the eldest."

"Oh, so it's your mama and your daddy who'll be missing you then, yes? And all the extra help?"

"Um…maybe. Especially in the morning, when they'll sleep in and stuff. But really it's because, you know, they're having sex." I said that without thinking and Ana's eyes went a bit wide, and then she laughed, and so did Yvetta.

"Oh, Amelia" Ana said. "Your mama, she'll be bringing home another little one soon. She can't stop it, yes?"

"Oh, um…no." I was feeling a bit uncomfortable now and wishing I'd never opened my big mouth about sleep-in Sundays.

"She's too old" Yvetta said, and, while I might have known that, I didn't really want to hear Yvetta saying it.

"But I think she's very fertile, yes?" Ana said. "So you never know. Plus, she has the younger man, so that makes a difference. Makes a difference for your mama anyway! Keeps her satisfied, I bet."

Now I felt really uncomfortable, and didn't want to talk about this anymore. Also I felt a bit…I tried to think what it was. Disloyal? I felt like I shouldn't be discussing this with other people. It might be one thing to talk about it when it was happening with Felicia, and wish that my parents understood the meaning of quiet, but I didn't think that I should be talking about it here. And now. With these people.

Mum would _hate_ it if she knew.

But she wouldn't, so it would be OK.

Well, I hope she wouldn't. Shit, would Yvetta's mum say anything to her?

I laughed slightly. "But, um, you know…that's just between you…and me…" I said, hoping they'd know not to tell mum.

"Oh, yes yes. I won't say anything to Sookie, although I feel like I should congratulate her on all the sex she's getting. I miss the sex. Not the sex with Franklin, maybe, but just…the sex with someone would be nice. I'd take the sex with Eric if it was on offer!" Ana laughed again, but now both Yvetta and I looked uncomfortable. Should she be saying she wanted to sleep with…well, Eric. Because I didn't want to know. Why did everyone think he was so bloody wonderful anyway? He was just a pain in the arse if you lived with him all the time. I didn't know how Mum put up with him.

Maybe she did it so she wouldn't be lonely like Ana? It was odd to think of Mum being lonely though, because she was just there. And so was Eric. Yeah, maybe she thought we had to keep him around and we got stuck with him.

That didn't mean I wanted him to leave us to come and live with Yvetta's mum though.

"So, did you actually want anything?" Yvetta said to her mother, and she said it really rudely. If I did that my mum would say something, but Ana didn't even seem to notice.

"I just wanted to know if you girls wanted something, yes?" She looked at us both.

"No" Yvetta said, still rudely. "I'm OK" I said to her.

Ana Lyudmila shrugged. "Suit yourselves. I'm going for a lie-down because work last night, shit it was busy. I was run off my feet. Not even a game on, but so many business people, so I have to work, because I want to see the men in their suits, but it's hard on the feet. I don't want to wear those ugly, flat shoes though, because the men, they don't look at you in the flat shoes. They only like the high ones. I bet Eric, he like the high shoes, yes? You could wear any heels you wanted with him, and still not be taller. With Franklin, eh, I had to be careful or else I was the tallest one."

Why did she keep going on and on about Eric? He wasn't her Eric, he was our Eric. I wanted to tell her that we saw him first, so she could piss off.

But you couldn't say that to your friend's mum, could you?

"We're fine. Just leave!" Yvetta said.

"Oh, you're so bossy. If my mama heard you talk like that, you get such a belting" Ana said.

"Yeah, but that's illegal here. You're not allowed to hit kids in this country, so tough" Yvetta said. I couldn't figure out what her problem was. I mean, mostly Ana was pretty cool. I couldn't see why Yvetta had to be all grumpy towards her. It just made me more uncomfortable and I hoped it would stop soon.

"I know. Sometimes I wonder why I brought you here. You have too much" Ana said darkly. "And you don't appreciate it."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm spoiled. Well, you did it. So now, buzz off."

Ana looked like she might say something else to Yvetta, but she didn't. "OK" she said. "Just let me know when you go out, yes?"

"OK" Yvetta said, and Ana left the room.

"Out?" I asked. I thought we were just hanging out here.

"Yeah…Dylan's coming round in a bit. With his friend Jack." Yvetta looked me up and down. "Jack's alright" she said. "He's not Dylan, but…well, he might like you."

I wasn't sure what I felt about that. I mean, I wanted him to like me. But I didn't really know him. I hadn't actually met him, of course, so I couldn't know him.

"Is the same age as Dylan?" I asked.

"Yeah. They're flatmates…so you know, just be cool with him, eh? Like, 'cos he's used to older girls and stuff, not _kids_." The way she said kids made it pretty clear that she thought I was pretty young and stupid, but I wasn't, and just because I didn't have a stupid boyfriend who worked in a supermarket like Yvetta did, didn't mean that I was young and stupid.

But maybe I would have. A boyfriend. A grown-up boyfriend and not one of those Grammar boys in their uniforms that walked past me in the afternoons on their way home. Because they were all really stupid and dumb, and if they saw me they'd all snigger and then push each other around and just laugh, and it was horrible because they were all laughing at me and I just wanted to cry, or run but I didn't, I'd just walk straight past them, and if they tried to talk to me I'd ignore them and keep walking and pretend I couldn't hear them calling "Hey! Are you that stuck-up?"

So maybe Jack'd be OK and not like that. And he'd take me to the movies and hang out with me and it would be really cool.

"OK" I said to Yvetta, "Sounds good."

We spent the afternoon just watching stuff on the internet. Yvetta wanted to watch this movie that had really, like, full-on sex scenes and stuff so we watched that. It's kind of weird, like, watching someone else. I wasn't sure it was a great idea. And it was really sucky when Yvetta said "So do you reckon that'll be your Mum and Eric in the morning, then?" and laughed.

And then when there was this scene with a blow-job, she pointed to the screen and said "Yeah, that's like…that's how it is. Dylan really likes that, and I don't mind doing it. I think it's important to keep a guy happy, and so, you know. Well, _you _don't know. But you will. You have to work to keep them." And I wanted to ask her if she'd really done that, because I thought it looked really gross, but I didn't want her to start telling me I was a kid again so I just shut up.

At least she didn't say anything about my mum having done it. Ugh.

But she wouldn't though. Not Mum. Mum's pretty, um. Straight-laced. Yeah, I couldn't imagine Mum doing _that_.

Although…maybe she did if Eric wanted to? Maybe Yvetta was right and you had to do that stuff if you wanted a guy, and Mum had had to keep Eric around for over ten years now, so she must have…done stuff with him and like made it so he wouldn't go off with someone else because for some reason all the women like Ana really wanted him.

Would he do it if Ana offered it to him? A blow-job? That was a really gross thought, but I couldn't stop thinking about it now. Maybe if you didn't do this stuff, then guys just went out and did it with someone else.

Relationships seemed really hard. And guys seemed really horrible. I wasn't sure I wanted a boyfriend; it might be a lot of work.

But it would be cool. And it would mean that when those Grammar boys laughed at me I really didn't have to care what they thought anymore, because I had someone better.

When the movie was finished we made dinner. Well, we made cheese on toast. It wasn't really dinner. Yvetta made all her own meals and Ana didn't seem to care what she ate, which might be better because Mum kept making me eat all this crap I didn't want to, and we always had to have the stuff that Eric liked, and he liked meat with everything. And meat was yucky.

So sometimes making cheese on toast might be better.

"We'd better get ready" Yvetta said, as she rinsed her plate and just dumped it in the sink. I wondered who did the dishes.

"Ready?" I asked, rinsing my own plate and holding it for a few seconds, before adding it to the pile in the sink. It seemed really messy in Yvetta's kitchen. I didn't really like the mess. A part of me wanted to clean it all, but that was a really stupid idea, and probably just because Mum always wanted everything clean and now I thought it was a good idea too.

"Yeah, 'cos when Dylan gets here, we can't keep him waiting. He'll get all grumpy, and just go without us."

"Oh. So, um…we're going out?" I just thought Dylan and his friend were coming here. I didn't really know if going out was such a good idea.

"Yeah, just for um, like, coffee? Or I think he wanted to check in on this party or something? But probably not for long. So that's OK, eh?"

Well I didn't really want to go out, I wanted to just stay in and hang with Yvetta, and not some stupid boys.

Although Jack might be OK. And he could maybe be my boyfriend. And I wanted a boyfriend…probably. So it would be OK.

"OK" I said.

The only thing I really had to wear was the skirt and jumper that Mum'd bought me that morning. "Is that new?" Yvetta asked me.

"Yeah" I said. I wasn't saying it was from Kmart though. Kmart clothes really sucked.

"I might borrow it sometime. The jumper, anyway. The skirt'd be too big on me." Yvetta pulled on some skinny jeans which showed that yeah, she had no hips. I wish I had no hips, but I had Mum's figure and it really sucked. I wish I was like Nana, or my aunts and really skinny. But somehow my stupid genes made me exactly like all the Stackhouses.

Yvetta eyed me critically. "It looks stupid with flat shoes" she said.

"Well, that's what I brought" I said. I was wearing my ballet flats and they were my best shoes.

Yvetta disappeared and then came back with some black high-heels in her hand. "You can wear Mum's shoes" she said.

"Oh. Um. Will your mum mind?" I asked.

"Nah" Yvetta said, standing in front of the mirror and teasing her hair. "I borrow her stuff all the time."

The shoes were a bit tight, and I wasn't used to the height of the heels, but Yvetta was right, they did make the skirt look better. I looked far less dumpy than I did with the ballet flats, anyway.

"I'll do your eye-liner, if you want" Yvetta offered, holding up her eye-pencil after she'd finished doing her own.

"OK" I agreed. I liked it when Yvetta put makeup on me. She was really good at it. I think she spent a lot of time practising.

She put some blush on too, and mascara and a bit of lip-gloss. "That looks better" she commented after she'd finished. It did too. I thought I looked older. Hopefully this Jack guy did as well.

"Will your mum mind if we go out?" I asked Yvetta.

"Nah" she said. "I do it all the time. I'll just leave her a note. As long as she knows I'm with Dylan she won't mind."

I wanted to say something else, because now that it was looking likely I'd be out and no one would know where I was, it didn't feel right. I mean, Mum and Eric always knew where I was, and they wouldn't like me going out with guys they didn't know. But I didn't want Yvetta to think I was being a baby about it all.

"Just don't freak out and be a baby" she said, looking at me, which kind of confirmed that I was better keeping quiet. We'd only be out for a while. What could happen, really? Nothing had ever happened to Yvetta and she did it all the time.

Yvetta had said that Dylan was coming at about seven o'clock, but we sat and watched TV until he turned up at eight. "Hey, babe" he said, when Yvetta opened the door. "You ready? I want to get going."

"Um, yeah. I just need to get my stuff…" Yvetta said, as she walked back into the house, leaving me with the two guys. I could see the guy who must be Jack standing behind Dylan. He wasn't quite what I'd hoped. He was about my height, and had really, really bad skin. And greasy hair.

But Mum had said that looks weren't that important, so maybe he'd be nice.

I didn't know what to say, and the guys didn't say anything. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to introduce myself or not, because Yvetta hadn't done it, but Dylan turned around and just said something to the guy who must be Jack, and kind of ignored me, so I didn't say anything.

Yvetta came back clutching a six-pack of those drinks that have vodka mixed with fruit juice or something. "OK" she said. "I've got my drinks."

"Cool" Dylan said. "'cos I only got enough beer for me and Jack. She's sharing with you, right?" He nodded in my direction.

Yvetta shrugged. "If she wants, I guess she can" she didn't sound enthused, and I wasn't either. I mean, I'd tasted alcohol at parties and stuff, but I didn't like it. Well, I didn't like Mum's wine. Or that beer Uncle Jason gave me to try. So this'd probably suck too. And it felt kind of wrong to be drinking. What if we got caught?

Although who was going to care at a private party? Probably they'd be Dylan's age and there'd be no parents or anything. And Dylan was nearly 18, so he could nearly drink legally anyway.

I shrugged. "Whatever" I said, figuring I'd just play it by ear.

We got into Dylan's car, which was really old and really messy and had, like, food wrappers and stuff all over the floor. And food. It was awful. It was worse than Mum's people mover. At least that didn't smell. Unless Ivan had been in it.

Yvetta sat in the passenger seat, so I had to sit in the back with the guy who I still assumed was Jack. As Dylan started the car and drove off the guy looked at me. "You still at school too?" he asked.

"Yeah" I said.

"Uh-huh" he said. His eyes slid down from my face and he was looking at my jumper now. He looked at my jumper for a long time. I was a bit worried I'd spilt something on the front of it, but when I looked down, I couldn't see anything. I really hoped he didn't know it was from Kmart.

But then he leaned forward in his seat and said in Dylan's ear, just quietly but loud enough that I managed to hear, even over the music coming out of the speakers, "You were right about the rack."

I realised he was talking about me, and worse, he was talking about my boobs. It was awful, I felt really uncomfortable, and I just sat there and I'm sure that I was really, really blushing because it was weird that he'd be looking at me like that.

But at the same time, it was kind of nice. I mean, he thought I looked good. Well, he liked my boobs. It was the same, wasn't it? Guys were meant to think you were cute, and then they talked to you, and got to know you, and they wanted to be with you. That was how it happened.

It might have been nicer if I thought he was cute, but I wasn't going to be picky and stupid. He might be really nice and smart. So I should definitely give him a chance.

Yvetta was singing along with the music playing in the car and I wanted to join in, but I didn't want to look dumb in front of Jack, so I didn't. I just sat there and wondered where we were going.

I think it was Ellerslie when Dylan pulled the car over and parked. It was just an ordinary street, with a lot of houses in it. And a lot of cars all parked down the street. I guess they belonged to people here for the party. I hadn't thought it was going to be that big. I hoped it wasn't one of those ones with lots of gate crashers where they have to call the police, 'cos Mum would be seriously pissed off if I was at one of those parties.

Good thing she'd never know.

Dylan got out of the car and walked around to the boot and opened it. Jack got out and joined him. I got out and Yvetta whispered to me, "Just be really cool, OK? I think Jack's really hot for you."

"Oh. OK" I said. I still wasn't sure how I felt about Jack.

"OK, you girls ready to have a good time?" Dylan said, coming over to put his arm around Yvetta.

"Yeah!" she said, enthusiastically. I noticed that Dylan was now carrying beer, and Jack had some too. I guess everyone was going to be drinking. I guess I could maybe try some.

The party was inside a house but I didn't know who it belonged to. There were a heap of people there, spilling outside the house. It was loud, there were a lot of people screaming and yelling and some were dancing in the corner where there were big speakers playing some music I didn't really recognise or like. Yvetta and Dylan pushed through the crowd and I tried to follow them, but I stood on this girl's foot and she glared at me, and she looked really scary, but I didn't mean to. It wasn't easy to walk in these stupid shoes of Ana's.

Eventually we found a sofa in a corner. It was a pretty grotty sofa and I didn't want to sit on it in my new clothes, but Dylan sat down, and Yvetta sat in his lap and then Jack sat down and I didn't have a choice but to sit there too. The sofa was small though, and I was pressed right up against Jack and his thigh was against mine and it wasn't nice, it was kind of uncomfortable.

But maybe I'd get used to it. I gave him a smile and I think he kind of smiled back. "So, do you work with Dylan?" I asked. I had to shout so he'd hear me.

Jack opened a beer and shook his head. "Nah" he shouted back. "I work in a bank."

"Oh. Cool" I said. That seemed better than a supermarket, anyway. So if Jack asked me out, I'd have a boyfriend with a better job than Yvetta's boyfriend had, because in a bank, he could like, get promoted and stuff.

Yvetta was now kissing Dylan and I couldn't talk to her and I didn't know what else to say to Jack. This was all pretty lame. I wished we hadn't come. I wished we'd just stayed at Yvetta's and made popcorn and watched a movie.

I wondered what movie they'd watched at home tonight.

I was looking around the room, watching all the people I didn't know drinking and dancing and talking and kissing, when Yvetta tapped me on the shoulder. "You want one of my drinks? You can have one, if you want" she said.

I figured it wouldn't hurt to try. "OK" I said, as she passed it to me.

The party got a lot better after that. I drank three of those drinks of Yvetta's. They tasted really nice, not at all like the wine or the beer I'd tried, but like a soft drink. I really liked them. And when we'd drunk all the drinks Yvetta had, she and I got up and danced, and that was a lot of fun. Dancing was much better than sitting around. We got talking to this other girl who was there, who Yvetta had met before through Dylan, and she had this bottle of something called Kahlua and she was mixing it with Coke, and that was really good too. Because I got really thirsty when I was dancing so the drink was kind of nice.

And then Dylan came over and was dancing with Yvetta, while they stood there and kissed a lot. And he kept grabbing her boob, which was odd to see. He looked like he squeezed it really roughly too. And then Jack came up and danced behind me, like, pressing into my back. And my bum. It felt weird, because it wasn't like we were going out or anything. And I could feel him breathing on me, which I really didn't like, and I was worried he might grab my boob, because I didn't want him to, but I wasn't sure if I could say no if he did because I didn't want him to think I was a baby, and I was having a pretty good time now and it would be a shame to spoil it all.

And then Jack turned me round to face him and he stuck his tongue down my throat and I really wasn't expecting that. I almost choked. It was really, really gross, and I was pretty sure that Eric didn't do it like that to Mum because it didn't make me want to giggle, it made me want to bring my knee up and get him in the nuts. Really, really hard.

But he pulled back, thank God, and I could breathe again, and he said "You're pretty hot" and I felt a bit better after that. I mean, he was only doing it because he liked me after all. So I let him do it again. I still didn't like it though. And he tasted yucky. I guess it was the beer. And he smelt kind of sweaty.

I didn't know where to put my hands so I put them on his shoulders, and Jack had his on my waist, but then one drifted up my side and I knew he was heading for my boob and I panicked and stepped back and away from him, and crashed into this other girl who said "Oi! Watch my drink, you stupid bitch!", but she didn't do anything to me.

"What's wrong?" Jack asked.

"Nothing" I said. "I just…I want some air." I felt really sick all of a sudden. I picked up my drink from where the cup was balanced on the bookcase, and then I walked past Jack, who just shrugged and said "Suit yourself." I looked around for Yvetta, so I could get her to come with me, but I couldn't see her anywhere now and I really hoped she hadn't left without me or anything.

It was really, really hard to walk in these stupid shoes now. I had to concentrate on putting each foot down carefully, so I didn't fall over, but I did once. Or twice. And it really hurt when I went over and my ankle bent. But I tried holding onto the wall and that was better, and I just kept going.

Outside there were still a lot of people but the air felt a lot better. Inside had been hot and close and I'd been regretting wearing a jumper. I was glad of it now.

There were a couple of people lying on a sun lounger by the back door and they were almost naked and I'm pretty sure they were actually doing it. Like, having sex in front of everyone. I wondered if that's what Yvetta was doing. I hoped Jack didn't want me to do it because I couldn't.

My stomach churned, and all of a sudden that drink hadn't been such a good idea. I turned to the side and threw up into a garden. "Having a good night there!" someone called out, and they laughed, but everyone else just ignored me. It looked like there was another pool of vomit next to mine anyway, so maybe I hadn't been the only one.

And when I lifted my head there was a guy pissing against the house a metre or so away from me. He just looked at me and didn't say anything. He was swaying on his feet anyway.

This was a horrible place and I didn't want to be here. I wanted to go home. I wanted Mum, but she'd be really angry with me now for coming here and for drinking, because she'd told me what my real dad had done and said that I needed to be responsible with alcohol and stuff because all drugs could be bad if you got hooked on them.

And then it occurred to me. Oh my God, I was drunk! I couldn't go home like this. I was stuck here, and I didn't know where Yvetta was, and I didn't know how to get home and I hated it all, so, so much.

I sat down on the ground and cried. Some girl I didn't know came over to me and asked if I was OK, but her speech sounded kind of slurred. The guy she was with said "Leave her" sharply. "It'll be boyfriend shit." Then she tottered off after him and I was all alone again.

I walked back into the house and found my bag by the sofa where I'd left it. I looked over at Jack, but he was now kissing the girl who'd given me the Kahlua, and feeling her boob, and she didn't seem to mind. I still couldn't find Yvetta.

I went back out the front door and stood on the driveway. I wasn't sure what to do. I could call a taxi, but I didn't have enough money and I didn't know where I was and I was scared of being in one all on my own anyway, and if I went back to Yvetta's I couldn't get in as she had the key, and if I woke up Ana she might be mad at Yvetta and then Yvetta would be mad at me.

Or I could have waited by Dylan's car, but maybe Jack would be mad with me now and I didn't want to have to get in the car with him. And I didn't know how long I'd have to wait anyway, and I wanted to go now.

Except I couldn't, because I threw up again. It was horrible. I was on my hands and knees heaving onto the grass and someone patted my backside and laughed and I felt like if I stayed here something bad was going to happen. I stood back up and wiped my mouth on a tissue I had in my bag.

Then I pulled out my phone and I called the first number I could think of. I was a bit worried he wouldn't answer, but then he did. "Daddy?" I said, and I burst into tears. "Daddy I want to come home."

**So our drinking age is 18, but like a lot of places we have problems with under-age drinking, and binge-drinking especially. It's not that hard to get hold of alcohol.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N Well I don't have anything inspired to say really, so on with the show!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, and I'm really sorry that I let some of them go out underage drinking!**

EPOV

I wasn't really expecting my phone to ring. And my sleep-addled brain couldn't really figure out what to do about it, so I ignored it. But it was harder to ignore Sookie kicking me in the shin and going "Phone!"

I don't know what she was annoyed about. It wasn't her phone.

I rolled over to answer it and heard the voice say "Daddy?" and couldn't for a minute figure out why the fuck Pam had called me. If she was in the backyard calling to say she'd caught a fucking fairy, I was pretty sure it could wait until morning. And that she should be in bed. And that she didn't really need to call.

But then the voice spoke again and I figured out who it actually was. I said "Amelia" though, just to be sure.

"Yeah" she said. "I want to come home. Like, now. Can you come and get me?"

"Oh, um…yeah?" I said. For some reason it was incredibly hard work trying to process all this information she was throwing at me. I really needed more sleep. I kind of wished she'd waited a few hours to call.

Sookie half-sat up and lent over. "Who is it?" she whispered. "Hang on" I said into the phone.

"Amelia" I said to Sookie. "She wants to come home." I was rather pleased I'd managed to get that all pieced together now.

"Huh" Sookie said. "There's probably been some huge fight between her and Yvetta and she's lying there stewing. I kind of expected it really, it's the trade-off for being so invested in the whole relationship; you're both as thick as thieves or else it's all horrible between you and feelings get hurt. God I'm glad I'm not that age anymore. OK, well go and pick her up and she can have some time to process it all before school next week." I couldn't quite figure out why, if Sookie was obviously so awake, I was going.

But Sookie knew. "Yeah" she said. "It sucks to be higher up the alphabet." Then she lay down again with her back to me.

I wasn't sure whether I'd be listed as Eric or Dad in Amelia's contacts list these days, but either way, Sookie was right. It did fucking suck.

I put the phone back to my ear. "Um…I'll just get dressed and then I'll get in the car and be there in about ten minutes." Yeah, that sounded like the correct sequence of events. Now I just had to do that.

"Um…" Amelia said. "Um…I'm not at Yvetta's…"

And that fucking woke me up. "What?" I said, as I got out of bed and walked out of the bedroom. "Where the fuck are you?"

I didn't get an answer to that. There was just sobbing on the other end of the line. Fuck.

"Just tell me" I said into the phone, but there was another noisy sob.

After a while Amelia said "You're mad."

Well, that was kind of a fucking given, but I figured that was part of the reason for the sobbing that wasn't getting us anywhere fast. "I'm just…just tell me where you are and I'll come and get you and then we'll talk."

There was silence for a bit, which was preferable to the crying, and then she said "I don't know."

OK, well that didn't fucking help me at all. "You have to be somewhere Ames" I said. "And I have to know if I'm going to come and get you. So just tell me!"

Amelia was quiet again. I was starting to worry about just how bad wherever the place she was actually was. I mean, fuck, they couldn't have…oh, I didn't even want to fucking think about it. "Just tell me" I tried again.

"It's a party" she volunteered. "In Ellerslie. I think…"

Well it could have been worse. And I'd fucking heard of Ellerslie. "What's the address?"

"Don't know" Amelia whispered.

It was times like these I wished they'd let you put GPS chips in your children. Originally I'd thought it would be a useful feature so we stopped losing Tray in supermarkets, but now, well now I could fucking think of why it would be preferable to driving the streets of fucking Ellerslie in the middle of the night looking for a party.

"OK" I said, trying to think of a way out of the deadlock. "Can you see a street sign?"

Through the phone I heard Amelia's footsteps, some girl screaming and a whole bunch of other voices yelling things that didn't seem to be intelligible at all. I fucking doubted that what they were yelling was actually in English. I fucking hoped she was actually in Ellerslie.

"I can't see a sign" she said in the end. "But the letterbox says number twenty-three."

Well that was something, but, quite possibly a lot of the streets in Ellerslie had a number twenty-three on them. The noise I could hear in the background might help narrow things down, but it wasn't exactly going to be a quick process.

"You'll have to ask someone" I said to Amelia.

"What?" she said. "I…don't know anyone."

"So? Someone will know. Just ask around and find the street name."

"Oh…but they'll think I'm dumb, or something…" Amelia protested.

"You'll never see them again, what do you care?" I pointed out.

"Oh. Um." Amelia was trying to think of a good way to get out of that. "You don't have a choice" I pointed out. "Either you ask, or I go back to sleep."

There was a sigh on the other end of the phone and Amelia said "Alright" quietly.

"OK" I said "You find out the address, I'll get dressed, and I'll call you back in about five minutes, OK?"

"OK" she said.

I was about to disconnect the phone when Amelia spoke again "Dad? You will come though, won't you?"

"Yeah. But I need to know where."

"OK then."

APOV

I didn't want to have to deal with any of the people here at all. They were all horrible and scary and if I asked what the name of the road was, then how dumb would they think I was?

I walked back out to the top of the driveway and looked at the road again. I couldn't see the street sign, but maybe if I could walk to the end of the road I could see it, and then I wouldn't have to ask anyone? But I couldn't walk in those stupid shoes anymore.

So I took them off and put them in my bag and started walking down the road. Well, I took two steps, but then there was this big group of guys sitting on the fence at the front and they were drinking and laughing and some of them were pushing each other, and then a couple turned to look at me and one said "Hey! You want a drink?" and he held up a bottle of something, and took a step towards me, and I knew that walking past them would be so much worse than walking past the Grammar boys on the way home from school, so I just turned around and walked back down the driveway.

So, crap. Now I'd have to ask someone. I went back into the house where it looked like maybe there were less people now. It was hard to tell. The music was still pretty loud, but no one much was dancing now, they were all just sitting around and talking…or kissing and groping each other.

I finally spotted Yvetta sitting in the corner of the room beside the kitchen. Probably it was meant to be a dining room, but there wasn't much furniture in it. "Yvetta" I said to her. "This party sucks, we need to go home."

"Dylan's having a smoke" she said. "With his mates. I could have had some…but I said no, not this time…" She looked at me, and she didn't look great at all. Her hair was all over the place and her makeup was smudged and I wondered if I looked that bad. I still felt bad, even after throwing up twice. I really wanted a glass of water, but I wasn't touching anything in that kitchen. From what I could see over the breakfast bar it was foul in there. And I was pretty sure there was a guy pissing in the sink. That was the grossest thing ever.

My phone started ringing and I figured it would be Dad, but I still didn't have the address.

"Where are we?" I asked Yvetta. "What's the address?"

Yvetta shrugged, but didn't answer. I answered the phone. "I don't know yet" I said to Dad, and I waited for him to be mad with me. He hadn't really been angry yet, but it was coming. There would be shouting and it would be horrible and it was all my fault. Well a lot of it was Yvetta's fault. But I'd get blamed. God, this was horrible.

Dad said I needed to hurry up because he was walking out to his car now, and then he hung up. "My dad's coming" I said to her. "I have to find out the address and he'll pick us up."

Yvetta screwed up her face. "Your dad?" she said. "But Dylan'll take us home. It's sweet!" She laughed, and kind of lurched sideways. I bent down to prop her back up and noticed that one of the people in the kitchen was Jack.

"What's the address?" I said to Jack.

"What?" he asked, looking from me to some guy standing next to him. Euw, that was pissing in the sink guy.

"Here. What's the address? My, uh…my ride's coming to get me."

Jack did this really unattractive thing where he kind of snorted at me. He was so gross. He probably peed in sinks too. "Your ride?" he asked.

"Yeah. My, uh…my boyfriend's coming. To take me to this other party. That isn't so lame as here, so you know. I need to know where I am."

"Uh-huh. Sure" Jack said. "It's Tui Street" he said, and he held up the beer bottle in his hand which read Tui, and I wasn't sure if he was having me on or not, but I'd just have to go with it and hope he was right.

"Thanks" I said. "See you round."

"Yeah" he said, sniggering. "Bye!" I heard him and that guy laughing as I walked off. Losers.

Yvetta was lying on the floor with her eyes closed when I got back to her. "Get up" I said. "We're going."

"No" she said, waving a hand at me. "Waiting for Dylan. He said he'll be back soon."

"Yvetta, I don't know where he is, but I'm leaving so I need you to leave too."

"No" she said.

I wasn't getting anywhere fast with Yvetta. "Well, come and wait with me. Please?" I pleaded.

"Don't be such a baby" she grumbled, while trying to curl up on her side.

I wanted to tell her to piss off and stop being such a bitch, but I was kind of stuck with her. Although God knows, without her this whole freaking night would have never happened to me. I hated Yvetta right in that moment, and I thought it wouldn't be such a bad thing if I left her here and Dylan left her here and she realised that none of us liked her anymore.

"Please?" I asked again. "I don't like it out there. All the guys keep yelling at me."

"No wonder you don't have a boyfriend" she said. "If you're scared of…of a few guys." But she sat up and let me pull her outside. "Such a baby" she murmured again. "No wonder Jack had to find a proper girl tonight."

Right at that moment I kind of wished I was Felicia because she'd just punch Yvetta for staying stuff like that and not feel bad about it and she got away with it too, because Dad didn't seem to mind that she yelled and screamed and fought and he even thought it was cool that she scratched people when she was playing netball, but if I yelled at everyone I was always the bad person and everyone told me to shut up.

But if I punched Yvetta she'd probably just say I was being a baby like my brothers, so I didn't. I led us to the front steps of the house and then I called Dad back. "It's Tui Street" I said. I didn't say that it was possible some guy had just given me the name of his beer and was laughing at me behind my back because I didn't want to let him feel me up.

"How do you spell that?" Dad grumbled. I guessed he wanted to put it in the GPS in the car. This is when it would be handy to have a parent who wasn't foreign and it might have been easier if Mum had been coming to get me.

But Mum'd look all disappointed and stuff. Maybe I'd rather just be yelled at. "T…U…I" I spelt out. "Like the bird."

"What fucking bird?" Dad said. Yeah, he was totally foreign.

"The noisy one. In the tree by the corner of the house."

"Oh. That fucking thing" Dad said and I knew then it wasn't going to be pleasant when he got here.

I put my phone away and sat next to Yvetta. A couple of people walked up the steps and one of them kicked me in the hip, I'm not sure if they did it on purpose or not, but I wasn't going to say anything. I mostly wanted to be invisible about now.

"I don't feel good" Yvetta said, and I ignored it, because I wasn't really talking to her, but then she threw up in a puddle by her feet. That was pretty gross too. I'd seen a lot of gross things tonight and I didn't really like any of them.

"I have to go inside" she said. "And get some water."

"No, uh…don't" I said weakly. I was worried I'd lose her again, and then Ana would blame me for it all when it really wasn't my fault. "Just stay here for a bit."

"I can't" Yvetta said. "I threw up." And then Yvetta started to cry, just a bit, and I felt totally out of my depth.

"Maybe we could move away from the vomit?" I suggested, because the smell was really rank and I didn't want to sit near it. I was worried I might throw up again if I had to stay here.

"OK" Yvetta said, nodding, but then she stood up and kind of wobbled, and she grabbed me and nearly pulled me down and for a minute I thought I was going to end up sitting in Yvetta's vomit and I really wanted to kill her. But then someone grabbed me and I didn't fall.

"You OK?" the guy asked.

"Yeah. I just…my friend's not well."

"Your friend's drunk" the guy said. Thank God he didn't sound all that drunk, because everyone else here seemed to be.

"I know!" I wailed. "But I need to move her." Yvetta had sat back down on the step.

"I'll help" the guy said, and he held out his hand to Yvetta, but he ignored it.

"Where's Dylan?" Yvetta asked the guy.

"That's her boyfriend" I explained. "He's, uh…he's gone out back."

"He's just having a quick smoke. Then he'll be back" Yvetta mumbled.

"Oh yeah? I know Dylan" they guy said. "I didn't think he had a girlfriend though, but the smoking thing sounds about right, eh?" He laughed and I gave him a polite laugh which I hoped was OK. He seemed alright, but I was so over this whole horrible night and I just wanted it to end.

But of course, with my luck, it got worse. Yvetta suddenly lurched forward and threw up again, like, only just missing me again. "Yvetta!" I said. "That's gross!"

The guy laughed, and Yvetta collapsed backwards onto the step behind her. "Sleepy" she mumbled. I think.

But now the smell had really turned my stomach and I felt sick too. I wished helpful guy would go away, because I didn't want to upchuck in front of him, but he didn't, and I tried to hold it in and breathe, but breathing made me sicker because Yvetta's sick was kind of horrid, and so I quickly took a few steps away and crouched down to throw up. I figured that would get rid of him, but it didn't. He came over, which was horrible because I didn't want him around, and he stroked the back of my neck where I didn't have any hair anymore and the skin was exposed.

That was creepy and nice all at once. I didn't know things could be creepy and nice at the same time. This was a really weird night.

When I'd finished I stood up and turned around and the guy just stood there looking at me. Now that I could see him better in the light coming through the windows from the living room of the house he looked a bit drunk too. Crap. I'd thought he might help me move Yvetta to the top of the driveway to wait for Dad, but he might drop her in the process and then she'd be even madder at me than she was probably going to be already for taking her home and not leaving her with Dylan. But I was more scared of Ana than I was of Yvetta, so I'd have to take it.

"You're really pretty" he said to me, and I didn't know what to say that to that. I mean, it was nice that someone finally liked me, and I kind of wished that Yvetta was awake enough to hear it, but I wasn't sure if he really meant it.

Was it OK to ask guys if they meant it? Or ask if they were just saying it because they were drunk?

Or maybe he thought I'd let him stick his tongue down my throat,like Jack had, because as nice as he possibly was, I was never letting anyone do that again. So, so gross. I didn't know how Mum did it.

But all this time I didn't say anything, and maybe he thought I really liked him, or something. Because he stepped towards me, and I kind stepped back towards the house, and luckily, I didn't stand in the vomit, because that would have been super-gross, but he looked at me. And he didn't stick his tongue down my throat, which I was really, really thankful for.

He stuck his hand up my jumper.

And I knew that I was supposed to say no, and I knew that I was supposed to hit him, or knee him or yell or scream or do something, _anything_ to say that it wasn't OK, even if he did think I was pretty. We'd only just met.

But I didn't. I just froze. I didn't know what to do. It wasn't pleasant, but at the same time, it was kind of weirdly unreal, like it was happening to someone else. And then he just pushed me back into the house, and I got really scared, but it was all sort of unreal still. Like this was a movie and it would stop soon, because I really, really thought that if it was going to get worse then I would be more afraid, because you know when there's like, major danger, don't you? So if it was bad, I'd be doing something, not just standing there waiting for him to stop. So maybe what I was, was mostly just annoyed.

His breath was kind of stinky. I really didn't like beer, I decided. Or boys. And together the combination was gross.

And then he pressed himself up against me, and I wondered what on earth he had in his pocket, was it, like, car-keys or something? And then I realised. And that was kind of gross too.

He managed to get the other hand up my skirt, and he was nuzzling my neck and I finally managed to sort of wriggle a bit to get his attention. He looked at me and said "It's OK, I won't hurt you", but I wasn't really sure that was comforting at all, because, like, what was the bit that _wasn't_ going to hurt me?

"I have to look after my friend" I said, because I figured that wasn't a definite 'go away' that might make him pissed off at me, but it kind of told him to go away. But he just shrugged and said "She'll be OK."

I was starting to get really worried now, worried that he thought I might have sex with him like those other people I'd seen out the back earlier. And, like, just, no. No I didn't want that.

He moved kind of sideways, so he was standing next to me, and he put his arm around my shoulder and the other arm on my forearm said "Let's go back inside" and I was so busy looking at him trying to work out what to say, I didn't notice who else was there.

But I did recognise the voice.

Dad said "Are you OK?", and I was about to answer when the guy said "It's alright, I'm just helping her. It's OK, dude. She's my girlfriend."

And Dad said "No, that's my daughter. Fuck off." The guy actually looked at Dad then, and I guessed Dad looked kind of scary because he did leave, really really quickly, and I was glad of that, although I wished I'd told him to fuck off instead of Dad, because that might have made the story better.

But then I looked at Dad, and yeah, he was scary. Shit.

EPOV

I found the street OK, and it was pretty fucking easy to work out which house was having the party due to the amount of drunk people staggering around the front of it, except it was hard to fucking park anywhere near said house. I fucking hoped none of the drunks were intending to drive because I sure as fuck didn't want to be on the road with any of them.

And they parked like shit, because there was nowhere to fucking park my car.

I ended up parked in a cul de sac off the street, and some woman in a bathrobe poked her head out the door and looked at me, and I wanted to say, 'yeah, I'm not one of the fucking drunks that's been keeping you awake', but I didn't because, fuck, it was kind of obvious.

Well I hoped it was, anyway.

I walked back to the house Amelia had given me the address to, and past a whole bunch of guys sitting on a fence drinking and yelling shit. Possibly they yelled shit at me; I didn't really care at this point. I just wanted to get Amelia and get the fuck out of there.

And when I started walking down the driveway, the scene wasn't that much better. The smell was pretty fucking rotten, and the people were just horrific. I tried to remember if the parties I'd been to when I was young were this bad, but I thought this might be worse. After all, Kiwis were pretty fucking bad at binge-drinking so it followed that they'd get pretty fucking trashed.

And make complete asses of themselves. Literally, but the look of the guys I could see mooning everyone.

I was thinking I was going to have to go inside the fucking house and find Amelia in there, and I was a bit fucking pissed thinking it might have been nice if she'd made an effort to be somewhere where I could fucking see her, but then I realised that 'drunk-girl-being-held-up-by-drunk-boy' standing by the front steps, was the person I'd come to collect. So that was fucking fantastic. Amelia's list of misdeeds now included sneaking out, drinking and…and possibly fooling around with a guy who really fucking shouldn't be touching her at all.

Thankfully, he fucked off when I showed up, although the fact he thought she was his girlfriend was fucking worrying. I hoped she hadn't agreed to be his girlfriend because the kid smelt like a fucking brewery and quite clearly had vomit on his shoe. I also fucking hoped she hadn't been pressured into anything. I wondered if I should have said something else to the kid, really fucking put the fear of God of into him, but he was gone now and Amelia looked kind of relieved, which was a good thing and suggested that maybe she hadn't been enjoying his attention all that much.

Maybe I could go after him, I wondered.

No, I figured I'd better turn my attention back to Amelia, which was kind of the point of being here. She looked at me, and then she looked down. Possibly to check where all the vomit was before she stepped anywhere. She didn't appear to be wearing shoes, which was a fucking dumb idea around here.

"You ready to go?" I said. I realised that wasn't the most comforting thing to say, but fuck, I was kind of pissed about the whole thing and I wasn't in the mood for being comforting. I just wanted to get her the fuck out of here, and let Sookie deal with her at home.

Amelia gave me a look that managed to be both pissed and guilty at the same time. "Yvetta's over there" she said, pointing to the girl sprawled on the steps. Oh. Yeah. Yvetta. Guess I was fucking in charge of her too. I really wanted to call her mother and tell her to come and get her kid, but I supposed I was here now. And it was the right thing to do.

"She keeps throwing up" Amelia said to me. Oh fucking fantastic, just what I needed. I wasn't sure doing the right thing should actually include have to get your car fucking valet cleaned afterward.

"Yvetta" Amelia said, crouching down "My dad's here. We've got to go now."

Yvetta mumbled something that was probably 'no', and tried to roll away from Amelia. She was probably going to regret lying in that position with a step protruding into her back in the morning.

"Get up" Amelia tried, and Yvetta didn't. I fought back the urge to just leave with Amelia, because, fuck, if Yvetta didn't want to come with us, it wasn't my job to drag her out of here.

Was it? Fuck. How far did this parenting thing go? When they were teenagers? It was shitty enough that I had to worry about my actual daughters without worrying about everyone else's daughters if I came into contact with them.

Seeing Amelia was getting nowhere, I thought I'd try in the hopes of speeding everything up. "Yvetta" I said. "We're going."

That actually got a reaction from her. She opened her eyes and looked at me. "Eric?" she said. "Like, Amelia's Eric? That's kind of…uh…" then she collapsed into fits of laughter. Not the reaction I hoped for.

"Get up" I said. I was going for stern. I got stern, and a fucking shocked look from Yvetta. She looked like she wanted to protest, but she didn't, she got up and Amelia took her arm, after putting her bag over the other shoulder, and then I put my hand on Amelia's back and sort of pushed the pair of them up the driveway.

The drunk guys were still sitting on the fence. One of them yelled out "Nice score, grandpa! Little young for you!", but he was the fucking least of the problems. Yvetta stopped walking just after that.

"I think I'm going to…" she didn't finish. She just threw up. Amelia jumped out of the way, and nearly collided with me, but I was pleased to see her reactions were still OK. Maybe she wasn't as far gone as Yvetta was, which was a fucking good thing.

I finally got them back to the car and we put Yvetta in the back and Amelia sat in the passenger seat. I wished I'd brought Sookie's car, it already had a wide variety of smells, plus old towels used to clean Ivan up after he'd gone swimming. You could not let that dog get anywhere near fucking water. At any rate, vomit wouldn't be such a big deal in that vehicle.

As we drove back to Yvetta's there was silence. I kind of felt I should be saying something, about the running off, although fuck, maybe Yvetta's mother had known? And maybe I should say something about the drinking? But I didn't think I could really talk. Or say something about not fucking going anywhere near drunk guys. But Sookie should probably do that. Or…not. At any rate, I couldn't for the life of me think of what to say that wasn't just going to come out as yelling at them.

So I just stayed quiet.

APOV

It was pretty clear how pissed off Dad was by the whole thing, so I just kept quiet in the car. I could totally understand why he'd be pissed off, but I really did want to point out that without Yvetta, none of this would have happened, so being pissed off at her was fine, and I was pissed off at her, but I didn't think it should all fall on my shoulders.

But it seemed to be, because Dad kept taking his eyes off the road to sneak looks at me. And I didn't even feel that sick anymore, so it wasn't like I was going to throw up. It was Yvetta we needed to worry about. But she was now lying on the backseat and I think she was snoring, so maybe we were safe.

God, I hated this whole night, and I wanted to turn back the clock so it would never have happened. But you can't do that, so I just had to hope it would be over soon. I felt like I was going to cry, but I thought if I did that, Dad'd just get more angry with me, so I had to fight the tears back. It just wasn't fair. None of it was fair.

And when we pulled up at Yvetta's place Dad gave me this look, like 'you're in serious trouble when I get back' and I thought, shit, I wonder if I could still stay over?

But probably not.

As Dad got out of the car he said "Stay here" to me, and that was my answer anyway. He walked around to open the door to the back of the car behind me and haul Yvetta out. "Oh" I said. "Shoes. Can you, um, take these in with her?" I handed him Ana's shoes out of my bag, and he took them, although I got the feeling he didn't want to, and then he walked Yvetta up to her door.

I couldn't really hear what they said, and I didn't exactly want to open the car door and be really, really obviously nosy, but Dad's voice sounded angry and Ana's voice sounded angry too. So I guessed I wasn't welcome back there in a hurry.

When Dad got back in the car he threw my bag in the backseat and looked really, really pissed off. Worse than before. I was glad it wasn't long until we got home and I could see Mum, because right now, I wanted her disappointment more than I wanted his anger. Stupid Eric. He thought it was OK to go and tell me off, and it wasn't. He wasn't my real dad.

Although he hadn't actually told me off yet, just frowned a lot. God, was this why Mum was so nice to him? Because she was scared of his anger?

I gave up thinking about it all and just figured I'd hide behind Mum when it hit. I looked out the window, but I wasn't really looking at anything. So it was kind of a surprise when we didn't actually arrive at home, but in the carpark of the McDonald's on Balmoral Road.

I looked at Dad because really, I did not feel like their food at this point in time, and he just said "We're getting coffee" and switched off the car.

Oh bugger.

EPOV

I hadn't meant to say anything to Yvetta's mother, but she was a fucking idiot. When she opened the door she looked from me, to Yvetta, back to me, and then to the shoes I was holding. "Oh!" she said, smiling brightly. "It's just like the Cinderella, you brought me back my shoes! But no singing mice and I do like the singing mice!" And then she fucking laughed.

"I brought your daughter back too" I pointed out.

"Oh" she said, looking a little chastened. "Well, yes. Um…you've got Amelia, yes?" she asked, as though she was asking if I had picked up some milk on the way home.

And I finally found somewhere for all that anger to go.

"Of course I've fucking got her, you stupid, careless woman! Do you even know where they fucking were? Or who they were with? Because Sookie and I sure as shit didn't until Amelia called us, fucking drunk and needing a ride home. Fuck knows who they could have been in a car with otherwise, and how drunk that fucking person could be."

Yvetta's mom looked fucking pissed now too, and scowled at me. "Yvetta's a good girl, and she knows to be careful with drivers. She's not stupid. Someone must have given her something, yes?"

"She's fucking drunk as a skunk right now, I doubt she fucking knows what day of the week it is. Anything could have happened to them. Any fucking thing and you wouldn't have known until it was too late. So count yourself fucking lucky that it wasn't any worse." I wanted to say more, but it was pointless. Absofuckinglutely pointless, because she'd never in a million years see that the problem was mostly her.

Yvetta's mom sniffed. "You think you're so fucking great, don't you? I bet the women…they all just…they lay down for you and you walk all over them! Well, I'm not your woman and I don't have to take the bullshit from you!"

"Fine" I said. "Get Amelia's stuff and I'll leave and never fucking darken your doorstep again."

She disappeared; leaving Yvetta slumped in the hallway, and came back with a bag she thrust at me. "Your daughter" she said "Is a bad influence. Yvetta's never been in this state before. Never. She drinks her drinks and that's it. And another thing…" she was really getting herself worked up now, and I couldn't fucking be bothered with it.

"Goodbye" I said, and I turned and walked to the car. "Don't fucking come back!" Yvetta's mom called after me, but I didn't turn around. I was done with her.

However I soon realised as I got back into the car, I wasn't yet done with Amelia. Sure, she looked mildly contrite about the whole thing, but I didn't think that maybe it was such a good idea to take her back to Sookie just yet, to be swept up and coddled and told it was all going to be OK because the point of all my anger was that it was very nearly so far from OK as to be fucking terrible. And I wanted to make sure Amelia got that.

So we went to McDonald's, which was the only place I could think of that was open at that time of night.

Amelia stayed quiet as I ordered at the counter, and then when we sat down with the coffee in their horrible little plastic cups. Under the harsh fluorescent lighting she looked pale and tired and the makeup smudged down her face really did nothing for her. The last bit of anger I'd been holding onto melted away and mostly, I just felt sorry for her.

I couldn't really think of what to say to her. How to say all the things I wanted her to know,to save her from having to go on a fucking drunken voyage of discovery herself.

So I just sipped my coffee, which might as well have been made from melted plastic cups for all it actually tasted like coffee. Fuck that was horrible.

Amelia sipped hers and wrinkled her nose. "I don't know if I really like coffee" she said, quietly.

"Just drink it" I said. "It'll help you sober up."

"I don't feel that drunk anymore" she confessed, looking down at the table.

"Well, if you threw up that'll help."

"It's really gross" Amelia said.

"Yep" I agreed, and there was silence for a bit.

APOV

Dad made me drink coffee. It made me feel kind of grown-up. More grown-up than the alcohol, anyway. Maybe I'd take up coffee drinking? Although it might have been nicer with milk in it, because the stuff tasted pretty harsh. I was too scared to ask him about milk though, he was still being, like, really really quiet and stuff and I waited for him to tell me off. Although being in a public place, he probably wasn't going to yell at me too loud, so I thought I should probably sip my coffee slowly and make it last and maybe he'd forget about the yelling.

Because if he yelled at Ana, I was pretty sure I was next in line for that treatment. What a crappy, crappy, crappy night this was.

EPOV

I figured out the pair of us sitting there, in silence, sipping that fucking awful industrial by-product in a cup wasn't getting us anywhere fast. "So, uh, you want to tell me what happened?" I asked Amelia.

She looked like she wanted to duck the question and she looked at the table for a while. Finally, she spoke. "It wasn't my idea" she began, and then she waited to see what I'd say to that. I forced myself to keep quiet and just sip the coffee. That stuff was fucking going to kill me, I was sure of it. I was pretty sure it hadn't been Amelia's original plan for the night, but attaching blame was kind of pointless right now. They'd both been stupid and they'd both been fucking lucky.

"So, uh, yeah…" Amelia carried on. "Yvetta said her boyfriend…Dylan…he'd take us out. To this party. And I said we shouldn't go!" She looked at me with her eyes wide, as if that would prove her innocence. But I'd seen that look many times, from all the kids over the years and it didn't really mean a thing I'd figured out. As long as they weren't being blamed for whatever shit had happened, they were happy.

When I didn't respond, she started talking again. "This has been the worst night _ever_."

"Yep" I said. "It has sucked."

"Majorly sucked" Amelia agreed, and then she took another small sip of her coffee, and sighed. "I thought it would be better, you know, 'cos everyone was older. But they were all a bit dumb. The whole thing was dumb. _And_ I saw someone pee in a sink! Can you believe that?"

Yeah, I could. I'd been to those kinds of parties. Dumb was one of the kindest things you could say about the events. But at the time, yeah, I'd felt like Amelia had. Thought they were a ticket to adulthood. Mostly I felt kind of angry at my dad for keeping all the fun to himself for all those years, because, fuck, getting drunk like that, that was the most fun I'd ever had. Well, I was pretty sure it was. There were a lot of parts of it that I couldn't fucking remember. But I had it on good authority that the parties, they'd been fucking fantastic.

And I'd kept going back to do it again. So it had to be good, right?

So I nodded and waited to see what Amelia would volunteer next. She seemed to have sobered up quite nicely now, which was a fucking relief, because I didn't much like the idea of taking a drunk Amelia home to Sookie.

"I don't know…" she said. "I just…there were a lot of people there. Why did they all think it was fun?"

"That stuff…the, uh, drinking and partying. It's never as good as you think it's going to be. And just because everyone else is doing it…you don't have to, you know."

"Yes, I know!" Amelia said, rolling her eyes. "But…I mean…I just wanted to…" I waited to see if she could spit it out anytime soon. "I don't want to be, like, the only one who doesn't fit in…or anything…" she looked at me expectantly.

"I think" I said, slowly. "I think you have to figure out whether those are the people worth fitting in with."

"Yeah" Amelia sighed. "And the drinking is stupid because, well…my dad, um, the first one…Mum said that he was using drugs and stuff and it made him really unhappy. I don't want to be unhappy."

"No one does" I told her, and I drained the last of the fucking awful coffee. "I used to drink…a lot" I said, kind of unsure as to whether that would actually help matters or just cement in Amelia's mind the idea that Sookie was totally shit at picking guys.

"Oh" she said. "Was that, like, before you knew Mum?"

"Yep" I said, figuring what she didn't remember she probably didn't need to be reminded of.

"Did it make you unhappy?" she asked.

"It didn't stop me being unhappy" I said. "And it didn't make me happy. It just…it complicated things."

"Oh." Amelia seemed to think about that for a moment. "So…it's bad to drink?"

"It's probably not a good idea to drink to excess. You end up making pretty shit choices." I wasn't going to list all of mine for her, but I hoped she'd seen enough at that party to get the idea.

"Mmm" Amelia said. "Those guys. At the party…they were all…they'd just do weird stuff, you know? And they kept, um…they kept wanting to grab me. And, um…" her voice dropped down to a whisper. "You know. Grope me and stuff. And they were all so, so gross. But why? Why do they think that's OK?" She looked at me earnestly and waited for me to say something.

And this was an area I kind of wished she'd waited to talk to Sookie about, because I was pretty sure it came under mother-daughter conversations. And I was pretty tempted to tell her exactly why they all wanted to grope her, and mostly it was to do with the fact that they were drunk and she was there. It didn't have a lot to do with her, more her ability to make rational decisions.

But there was every possibility that saying that to her might put her off guys for life. And while that was kind of a comforting thought after what I'd seen tonight, and while I could entertain visions of Amelia suddenly developing the desire to be a nun and finding herself a small order which didn't insist on vows of silence, and Sookie and I visiting her once a week and knowing exactly where she was and what she was doing at all times, I did kind of know that I'd be cheating her out of something wonderful. Something wonderful that she could maybe experience when she was, say, 35. But something wonderful all the same.

I looked at her across the table, and her green eyes stared back at me waiting to see what I'd say. "Well, Ames" I said. "You're beautiful."

That made her smile for the first time since I'd picked her up. "But, uh, clearly those assholes don't deserve you. You shouldn't be with them just because you were too drunk to realise they were assholes, anyway."

"Yeah" Amelia said. "But, you know, they're from here. So probably they're _arseholes_."

"Fuck, you sound like your mother" I said, but she laughed. "You finished?" I asked, nodding at her cup.

"Yeah" she said slowly.

"Then we'd better get home."

"D'you think Mum'll be mad?" she asked, as we tossed our cups in the trash.

"No" I said, and I was pretty sure she wouldn't be. "I think she'll just be glad to see you."

We walked back outside to the car and Amelia was just about to climb in, when she turned to me. "I'm, uh, sorry, you know? For all of this…and just for, making you come out, and stuff…"

I shrugged. "It's kind of my job" I said. "To come and get you."

"Yeah…but you know. Thanks. And I'm sorry. And I'm glad."

"Glad?" I asked.

"Yeah. Glad it's you. That she picked. Glad you're my dad."

Oh. I really didn't fucking expect that. I had hoped that maybe she'd be a little bit sorry for it all, and maybe that she'd realise it wasn't such a shit-hot idea to sneak out to God knows-fucking-where, but I didn't expect…well, _that_.

"It's OK, Ames" I said, and she stepped in and hugged me. For a nasty minute I thought she might be crying, so I stroked the back of her head and down her neck.

"Your hair is really short now" I said.

"I know!" she said, laughing through the tears.

"But it's nice" I added. "I like it."

"Me too" she said, stepping back and getting into the car.

APOV

Dad's pretty cool, thank God, because otherwise the night could have been a total disaster. But it was alright. In the end. And when he stroked my neck, it was just nice, not creepy with it. It's way better without the creepy.

**Tui (Too-ee) is both the name of a native bird and a brand of beer known for it's humorous advertising.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N So if anyone is after stories of the toddler, she's nearly two now. Her birthday is at the beginning of December. Which means it's about two years since I discovered fanfiction. But she is mostly trying to persuade me not to take her to daycare by yelling "No brocli!" at me - the fact they make her eat her veges is kind of traumatising - and practicing her ninja skills by going at her sister with balloons on sticks, one in each hand and arms circling furiously as she advances. She can get quite a few hits in and it has totally thrown the balance of power in my living room out of whack.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I felt Eric getting into bed behind me and idly wondered if it was a bad thing that I hadn't heard the front door, or him moving around the room or anything else. I liked to think that somewhere, buried deep in my subconscious I was registering all those things as familiar, because I could tell it was Eric. But it did make me worry slightly that maybe anyone could surprise me in bed and I'd be none the wiser.

Thank God it was only Eric then.

"Is she OK?" I asked him, as he jiggled me around trying to get himself comfortable.

"Yep" Eric said, and I lifted my head off the pillow to look at my bedside clock. The time looked wrong, or maybe I was reading it wrong. At any rate, something didn't add up.

"You were a long time" I said to Eric.

"Yeah…" he said slowly. "Amelia was um…" there was quite a long pause. Well, it seemed to be quite a long pause, but then my sense of time was a bit screwed up due to the fact that it was the middle of the night. "At a party" Eric finally said.

For a few seconds I wondered who on earth was holding a late night birthday party, but then my brain was thinking about birthday parties as they used to apply to Amelia, all balloons and party games and wondering what you'd get in the gift bag at the end. Pretty much the stage Pam was still at given the preparations that had been going on for her birthday party.

And then I realised what kind of party it might be. The kind I never went to as a teenager, well, apart from the few times I went out with Jason and his mates, and even then those parties tended more towards the ramshackle and noisy, rather than the out-of-control and dangerous.

"A party?" I asked. "Whose party?" I rolled over to face Eric and he just lay there and looked at me. He looked tired, and I felt sorry for keeping him up longer, but I wanted to know what had happened.

"Dunno" he said, running a hand over his face and sounding totally unconcerned.

"Was Yvetta there too? Did you bring her back? Are they OK?" I asked as all the questions raced through my mind in a tumble. What the hell had Amelia been doing?

"Yes" Eric said, and then he decided that was all he needed to say, and he closed his eyes and looked like he might go back to sleep. But I couldn't sleep now.

"So, she's really OK?" I asked.

"Yeah" Eric said, rolling back towards me and trying to get me to lie down in the process by basically throwing a leg over me and kind of pushing me into the mattress. He was helpful like that.

"Maybe I should go and talk to her" I said, as I relented, rolled over and lay back down in my original position again.

"No, she's good" Eric said, pushing my hair away from his face. "We had a chat and I've made sure she's had some water and pain pills before bed."

"She was drinking?" I asked, not really believing it as I asked it, but what Eric had said seemed to point in that direction and the fact he was trying to go to sleep on me wasn't really comforting.

"Uh…yeah" Eric said, sounding kind of reluctant. "But it's fine, Sookie. She's here now and nothing happened."

I hadn't really thought beyond the actual going off somewhere, and then trying alcohol before that point. But the whole 'nothing happened' comment made me think of a bunch of things that could have happened. And even though I knew that Eric wasn't lying and that Amelia was, indeed, in the house with us now, probably tucked up in her own little bed, my poor heart was racing with worry.

But obviously Eric had done his worrying earlier in the evening and it had worn him out and now he was happily snoring away behind me.

I, however, had no hope of sleeping now. I wanted to go and see and touch Amelia and make sure she was really OK, but I didn't want to disturb her, and I didn't want to seem hopelessly needy in front of Eric.

So I waited until the snores turned to a lot of heavy breathing, which usually signified that he'd fallen into a deeper sleep, and then I carefully wriggled out from underneath him and tiptoed to Amelia's room. She was, as I'd hoped, fast asleep in bed, looking none the worse for wear other than the smudged makeup around her eyes. We were going to have to have a talk about removing eye makeup before bed, I realised.

And probably a lot of other things.

Bella stalked past me into Amelia's room, flicking her tail in my direction. She jumped on the bottom of the bed and spent a minute or two moulding her body so that it was perfectly aligned with the curve of Amelia's calves. She was glad to have Amelia home. And she wasn't sparkling like some of the other feline members of the family, so that was a bonus.

And I was glad to have Amelia home too, but unlike Bella, I couldn't get to sleep quite that easily. Not even once I managed to get myself back into bed, which was no mean feat as Eric had sprawled out and appropriated my pillow in my absence.

Usually Eric's presence in bed was kind of overwhelming, but mostly comforting. Not tonight though, or, not this morning anyway. I'd thought that I'd be spending Sunday comforting an Amelia who'd fallen out with her best friend and who had had to learn, once again, that female friendships were fraught with all sorts of pitfalls. But it looked as though I was in for something else entirely. I wondered at what point you felt qualified for parenthood. Or, at least, for parenting a teenager. Would I feel any better about it when Pam was this age?

I lay there for a long time, thinking about it all and wondering what, if anything, I could say to Amelia and what her reaction was going to be. And then eventually I must have drifted off to sleep.

When we woke up though, Amelia wasn't really our biggest concern. I had been lying there enjoying my lie-in Sunday and Eric was still dead to the world, his middle of the night rescue mission having tired him out. But that was OK, I was happy to let him sleep half on top of me for a bit longer.

I was, but Pam wasn't. There was urgent knocking on the bedroom door and she called out "Daddy! Daddy! We have to go and check the catcher!"

Eric did not wake up to that. "Daaaaddy!" Pam wailed. I tapped Eric's shin with my foot and he mumbled "Stop kicking me!" like I might really hurt him.

"I saw sparkles!" Pam yelled. "We've got one, but I don't want her to get away so I need you come now!"

Oooh, I had been thinking it would be nice to go out and see Pam's excitement at the sparkles, but I now realised that maybe she was expecting more than a bit of glitter. Bum. This might not be pretty.

Eric should definitely be there to let her down gently.

"Oi! Wake up. Your daughter wants you" I said, rolling over to face Eric.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. "Why is she always _my_ daughter when she needs someone to get out of bed and go outside?"

"So you were paying attention! Great, now help me deal with Pam." I got out of bed and opened the door, "We'll be out in a moment" I said, and Pam sighed audibly. "Tell Daddy to hurry up" she said. "I need him to make sure she's trapped properly."

"Um…OK" I said, wondering why I wasn't considered up to the task of being a fairy-jailer.

I went into the bathroom and used the toilet and brushed my teeth and came back out to find Eric still sprawled in bed and Pam pretty much bouncing next to him. "Come ON, Daddy!" she said. "You can't sleep ALL day!"

"I can" Eric said. "Want me to prove it?"

"No! Because…because…but we have to go out. We have to go out NOW! Get up!" Poor Pam, she wasn't really in the mood for Eric teasing her, she just wanted to go and get her fairy.

Eric reluctantly peeled himself off the bed and went into the bathroom. "So, um, you really think there is one out there?" I asked Pam.

"Oh yes! There are sparkles, LOTS of sparkles. I think we caught a really pretty one." Pam nodded and clutched whatever she holding to her chest.

Sam came wandering into the room. "You're up" he said to me.

"Yeah" I agreed.

"Does that mean I don't have to make my breakfast?" he asked.

"You can if you want" I said.

"Sweet" Sam said, and he padded off as Pam said "I got a fairy, so you were WRONG stupid-head Sam!" I wondered what the mess in the kitchen would be like when I got there, Sam was pretty good at sorting out food for himself, and occasionally Tray and Pam if they showed the appropriate amount of gratitude, but he didn't exactly understand about clean up, although on occasions Ivan had been known to pitch in and help out.

Eric came out of the bathroom and Pam pounced on him, grabbing his hand. "Let's go!" she said enthusiastically.

"Uh-huh" Eric said, and his eyes flicked to me, as though he expected I'd have some answer to the dilemma of how to let Pam down easy. Yeah, I had no clue. I just shrugged and then followed them out of the room.

As expected, Sam was in the kitchen when we got towards the big bi-fold doors to the deck, and Tray was hovering around eating cereal straight out of the box. "You guys alright?" I asked.

"Yep" Sam said, frowning at Tray, who ignored him. Ivan, who'd been sitting there as well, got wind of the fact that Eric was present and came over to see what we were doing. "I got a fairy!" Pam sing-songed.

"A fairy?" Tray asked, although his mouth was full and it sounded more like "A fweree?"

"Yeah" Pam said. "So we can't take Ivan out there, because he'll bark and frighten her. Ivan, you stay here."

Ivan ignored Pam and stood there panting expectantly at Eric. "Ivan. Sit!" Eric said, and Ivan did, but my God, he looked sad. I didn't think any of the kids had ever managed to pull out a look quite that heart-breaking. I guessed they didn't call it puppy-dog eyes for nothing.

Eric then opened the door and Pam ran through. "Come on!" she said, skipping down the steps.

Eric looked at me. "She'll be OK, though, won't she?" he asked. Then he thought for a minute. "Yeah, she'll be OK" he said, and I wasn't about to disagree as I kind of liked his version of the outcome.

And then he followed Pam down the steps, and I followed him. Pam was pointing at the ground around the lemon tree in excitement when we got there. "Fairy dust!" she yelled. I hoped Mrs Bodehouse hadn't had a big night the night before, because the screaming kid waking her up early on a Sunday morning might be a bit much if she was feeling delicate.

"See, Daddy! Sparkly fairy dust. I _told _you there'd be a fairy, and you can always tell when there's a fairy, because there's fairy dust. Look, inside! Quick! I wonder if she's pink? Do you think she's a pink one? The dust's kind of pink, but silvery too. Maybe she's pink and silver? I want to look!" Eric just stood there watching Pam dance around, and then he slowly reached for the fairy catcher.

"Careful Daddy!" Pam warned. "Maybe she'll bite!"

"You didn't tell me there was a danger of being bitten" Eric said, as he stopped what he was doing.

"Oh…no, I think you're OK. She'll only bite boys. Like stupid boys. Stupid boys I want her to bite!" Pam glanced towards the house and I figured I knew who her candidates might be. "Open it!" she squealed, and as Eric opened the end of the fairy catcher, I held my breath and Pam clapped her hands and bounced on the spot, putting whatever she'd been holding underneath her arm.

Eric looked inside, and then looked closer, and then he tipped the fairy catcher up and shook it, which sent all the glitter I'd placed inside it the night before floating down to the grass.

"Where is she?" Pam demanded, and there was a worrying tremor in her voice.

"Sorry, sweetheart" Eric said. "I think she got away."

"What?" Pam asked, coming over to look as well.

"Yeah, uh, obviously she _was _here" Eric said, "So the catcher works…I guess she just got out."

"How?" Pam demanded, looking from the fairy catcher in Eric's hands, to Eric's face and back again.

"Magic" Eric said. I guessed he thought that would cover it.

"No" Pam said, quietly. "But…but, no. I was going to catch a fairy."

"Well, I think you did. She just got away" Eric said, patting Pam's shoulder.

"And you said it was very hard to catch a fairy" I reminded her. "So at least you managed that."

Pam turned towards me and looked at me like I was an idiot. "But if you catch them, you get to keep them!" she yelled.

"Um…" I said. "Wouldn't that be a bit mean to the fairy?" I chided myself for worrying about the welfare of a creature that didn't exist in the first place, but I was slightly worried about Pam's desire to own a fairy.

"No!" Pam said. "No, if you catch them then they'll be your friend! And I made a box to put her in! It has holes in the top and everything!" She held up the box she'd had tucked under her arm, and sure enough, it was covered with pretty paper and sparkly stones and there were holes in the top.

So she wasn't completely heartless. That was good to know.

What I didn't know, was how to cheer her up about the absence of a fairy in the trap this morning. I waited to see what Eric would come up with.

"Maybe you'll have more luck tomorrow, Pam" he said.

"They'll just use magic again!" Pam yelled. "You didn't tell me about the magic! The fairy catcher doesn't work if there's magic, does it Daddy? Does it Daddy?"

"Well, maybe not" Eric conceded.

"So it doesn't work then! And I told EVERYONE there'd be a fairy at my party. And I want a fairy at my party!" I'd been a bit worried Pam might cry, but her anger seemed to be over-riding everything else at the moment. And that anger was directed towards Eric.

"What's Pam yelling about?" Felicia asked from behind me.

"There's no fairy. In the fairy catcher" I said.

"Bummer" Felicia replied. "There's supposed to be a fairy at her party. She's been telling _everyone_. I'm going to get some toast." And then she walked off. How come I didn't know about the fairy being promised to everyone?

"Pam. Calm down" Eric said firmly. Yeah, Eric wasn't big on the whole being blamed for stuff. Especially by any of the kids.

"I don't want to!" she roared. Why were all my kids so loud? I mused.

"Stop this right now!" Eric yelled back, and I got my answer. Thank goodness Kennedy and Danny weren't due back until later in the day.

"You're being mean!" Pam yelled at Eric. "You're being mean and I don't have a fairy and my life is sucky and you all suck and I don't like it here and I'm going…somewhere else!" With that she turned and ran past me into the house. Ivan came down the steps, as Pam didn't shut the door behind her, and walked over to Eric to console him. Eric didn't really seem to want consoling.

So I decided to go after Pam instead. "I'll go and talk to her" I said to Eric.

"Uh-huh" he said, not looking at me, but looking down at Ivan instead.

Pam was in her room with the door closed, and when I opened it she said "Go away."

"Sweetheart, don't be sad" I said, hoping she'd cheer up a bit.

"I'm not sad" Pam said, looking at me from her spot on the bed. "I am pissed off". Yeah, having bigger kids in the house, Pam had a great vocabulary. Unfortunately not all of it sounded wonderful coming out of the mouth of a nearly five year old.

"Well, I get that" I said. "I know it's frustrating when things don't go the way you thought they would, but…you've still got your birthday to look forward to. And your party."

"There won't be a fairy at my party" Pam grumbled. "And it's Daddy's fault and I'm not talking to him."

"Well, that'll make Daddy sad" I said.

"Good. I want him to be sad. He shouldn't promise me this stuff if he can't deliver." I sighed. Pam really did hear too much sometimes.

"Uh…I don't know that he promised a fairy as such…" I said.

"Don't care. Don't like him" Pam crossed her arms and looked grumpy, and amazingly like Eric.

"I think…well, just I think that'll make Daddy sad. If he thinks you don't like him."

"Well, I don't. So he can…he can…" she didn't finish that sentence.

"OK. Um…I'm going to go and get some breakfast now, so you come out when you want."

"I'm never coming out!" Pam replied.

"Well, just when you want to" I said again, ignoring her last statement and feeling totally out of my depth. As I left her room it occurred to me that I had thought I'd be out of my depth with the fourteen year old daughter that day, I hadn't expected the four year old to be throwing me for a loop as well.

Kids were hard.

When I got to the kitchen Amelia had appeared, and was standing there talking to Eric, smiling at him broadly as he handed her…some coffee? It appeared that Eric had lost one fan and gained another all in the space of twelve hours. It was like we'd slipped into another dimension.

"She's not coming out" I said to Eric as I walked over and took the cup of coffee he handed me. "I think we'll just leave her until she calms down."

"Mmm" Eric said, nodding.

"So, um, how are you this morning?" I asked Amelia.

"Oh. Um…" her eyes slid towards Eric. He nodded, and she continued. "I'm OK. I mean, I don't feel really crappy like Dad said I might, but that's because he gave me that stuff last night. I really like coffee now." She nodded to herself and smiled at Eric again over her coffee cup. Yep, I was definitely in bizarro-land, Pam fuming at Eric and Amelia gushing at him.

Luckily the happy medium in the family walked in then. "Why're you home?" she asked Amelia.

"Got bored" Amelia said, shrugging.

"Yvetta finally lose that last brain-cell?" Felicia asked.

"Shut up!" Amelia replied.

"You shut up!" Felicia retorted, but she didn't sound particularly angry. Sometimes I wondered if she just went through the motions of fighting with her siblings for form's sake. Most of the time I got the impression she didn't really care. Well, she cared what Sam was doing. Sam just annoyed her on principal.

"You should both shut up" Sam said, as he came in to return his plate.

"_Everyone_ should shut up" Eric said.

Felicia shrugged and left again, Sam put his plate in the dishwasher; pushing away Eddie who tried to climb inside it to investigate the interesting smells, and Amelia went back to watching Eric out of the corner of her eye. I decided to feed the pets and let them all get on with it.

EPOV

I went to bed thinking I was doing a fucking OK job at fatherhood, but five minutes after getting up that illusion was pretty much shattered by Pam's lack of a fucking fairy. Why she wanted a fairy in the first place was totally beyond me. I mean, fuck. What the fuck would it do? Sit there and fucking shit sparkles?

But somehow she'd got the fucking stupid idea that I was going to get one of these things for her because I'd agreed to help with the fucking stupid fairy catcher. That was a move I was now regretting.

And now I was stuck thinking about how to get her a fucking fairy for her party. I wondered if I could just stick wings on that fucking stupid cat that was trying to climb into the dishwasher, because, fuck, he was fuck all use for anything else. But he wouldn't fit in a shoebox. And he wouldn't exactly impress her friends at the party. He didn't impress anyone much, and certainly not Stan who had taken advantage of the fact that he was distracted by the dishes to start a fight, and now Sookie was trying to separate the pair of them, while telling Stan off and crooning at Edward. I wasn't sure what was worse sometimes, the kids or the pets. I sighed, and rubbed my face.

"I'm sorry, again" Amelia said. "I guess you're tired." She'd been surprisingly pleasant this morning. Far too pleasant. I figured it wouldn't last, but I wasn't sure how we could harness the pleasantness while it was around.

"It's OK" I said. "Like I said, it's my job."

"Kind of a stink job" Amelia said, taking another tiny sip of her coffee. She kept telling me she liked it but she wasn't exactly drinking much of it. Still, there were worse things she could be drinking; we'd already proven that one.

"I signed up for it" I said to her, while watching Sookie try to balance the plates of cat food while the cats tried to trip her up.

"Yeah. You did, didn't you?" Amelia said. "I mean…that's weird."

"What's weird?" I asked. I'd gone back to thinking about Pam. She'd been in her room for a while. Maybe I should go in there?

"You know. Moving in. With us, like, Mum and me and Leesha. It wasn't just Mum. So…you don't get that. In books and stuff."

I shrugged. It probably depended on what books you read and most of the time Amelia seemed to have shittier taste than even Sookie did.

"I guess though…Yvetta's step-dad, he, like brought her over. With her mum. But then…you know, they split up and stuff. You only see it in real life."

"Yeah" I agreed, really only half-listening. Yvetta and her mother were not on the list of things I wanted to discuss.

"And he didn't want them in the end" Amelia said. She was quiet for a while. "I don't think she'd ring him" she said, and I was totally lost now.

"Who?" I asked, and I nodded at Sookie who was holding up the loaf of bread to see if I wanted any toast. I wondered if she'd make eggs too, or if I should make eggs. Eggs might be good. And more coffee. I was fucking tired.

Amelia sighed. "Yvetta. She wouldn't ring her dad. But I can ring you."

"Yeah" I said, thinking that we'd already established that and this conversation seemed to be going round in circles and Sookie was busy putting that Marmite shit on her toast so I might have to get the eggs out myself. Could I be fucked making eggs? I looked at the clock on the oven that Sookie loved. It was likely to be a long fucking time until lunch so eggs were probably a good idea.

"So, uh. You know. Thank you!" Amelia said brightly. Yep, conversation going in circles.

"You can owe me" I said, hoping that might give me an out. I put my cup down and walked over to get the frypan out.

"OK" Amelia said, and then I think she left the kitchen.

SPOV

Pam did not cheer up in a hurry. She finally emerged from her room, but kept well away from Eric. Eric didn't appear pleased at the new development in their relationship and took it out on Stan who tried to ankle-tap him as he walked down the hall. Well, ankle-tap might be a bit of a mild description for it. It was more a tackle with claws, but Eric wasn't pleased with it either way.

The boys buggered off away from Eric and his gloom and went outside to do God knows what. With the shovel.

"Did you know they've got the shovel?" I said, watching them walk across the lawn with Sam carrying it. Eric had come into the kitchen to return his cup, up until then he'd been holed up in the office with his tax stuff.

Eric shrugged. "They did ask me, if that's what you're asking" he said.

"But why? What's it for?"

"They're digging a hole, Sookie." Eric sounded like he was explaining that to the slow member of the class.

"But what's the hole for?" I asked, and Eric just shrugged. "I didn't ask" he said, and he left the kitchen. I was a bit worried about having to host a party here the next weekend where I didn't have to just worry about the potential for rain, but also the possibility of there being large traps lurking in the garden. My worries weren't allayed when I heard Tray yell "Dad! Dad, do we have a pick-axe?"

Mostly though I worried about Pam. And Eric. And what I still probably had to talk to Amelia about. It was a lot of worries for one Sunday and I decided I'd worry about the hole on another day, possibly when Ivan went missing.

Pam and Eric ignored each other through lunch and in the afternoon I found her with Amelia. She'd finally got Amelia to paint her nails for her. "See?" Pam said, holding up one hand. "We're putting the rainbow sparkle over the dark pinky-purple. I'm going to have this for the party. This is a test-run."

"Yep" Amelia agreed.

"Well, that looks nice" I said.

"I know!" Pam agreed.

"So…uh. I just wanted to say, um…Daddy's kind of sad that you're not talking to him" I said.

Pam looked straight ahead. "He promised me a fairy. I didn't get a fairy. Daddy sucks."

Amelia looked up from Pam's toenails. "Daddy doesn't suck" she said.

"Yeah! You said he did!" Pam sounded shocked.

Amelia shrugged. "Nah. He's alright. He kind of saved me."

"From a dragon?" Pam asked her blue eyes wide.

"Um…kind of" Amelia said, putting the top on one bottle of nail polish and opening another. "He, uh…well he was there. And he was great. And he's kind of scary sometimes. Good scary."

OK, I wasn't sure I needed to know why Eric had to be scary, but I was interested in Pam's reaction to all of this. She huffed and she looked at the toes Amelia was painting and finally she said. "He's alright."

"You can always have Mum" Amelia pointed out. "She's the underpants fairy."

Pam looked me up and down. "Not enough sparkles" she said. "I wanted a sparkly fairy."

Amelia shrugged. "You've got sparkly nails" she said.

"I do" Pam agreed, examining them. "Can I do yours, Ames? Please?"

Amelia sighed. "Alright. But don't mess them up!"

"OK" Pam said, happy that her big sister wanted to hang out.

Felicia stuck her head in the door. "That stuff pongs!" she said. "It'll rot your brains and turn them all to sparkles." And then she left again, although I could hear her yell "Dad! Dad, Sam and Tray are making a huge fucking mess in the garden!"

Pam didn't really seem to be taking Amelia's advice at dinner; she was pretty much still ignoring Eric. My biggest problem at dinner, though, was getting Sam and Tray to actually come in and eat and leave their new project.

"We're coming!" Sam had yelled, from the back of the section, and then they hadn't appeared.

In the end Eric had had to go and haul them away from it and get them to wash their hands and sit down at the table.

"So, you're, uh…digging a hole?" I asked Sam.

"Yep" he confirmed.

"Why?" I asked, hoping they weren't thinking they could dig through to the Northern Hemisphere.

But Sam just shrugged. "S'fun" he said, as he looked around the table, scoping out what everyone else had on their plates. He stopped at Amelia's plate of mushroom risotto. "How come you don't have spaghetti?" he asked.

"I don't eat meat" she said. Sam wrinkled his nose. "It's in the sauce, dumb-dumb!"

"That's lame" Sam said.

"You're lame" Amelia replied. "And that hole is a really lame idea."

Sam shrugged, and went back to eyeing up Tray's rapidly-diminishing plate of spaghetti bolognaise.

I got to do Pam's shower and read her a story as I was now the favoured parent, apparently. It hadn't been a position I'd actively campaigned for, and it wasn't one I particularly wanted. God knows, Eric had been upset enough about Pam starting school in a week; he didn't need her abandoning him altogether. I think sometimes the kids forgot he had feelings too.

But my talk about apologising to Daddy fell on deaf ears, I think. "He really does love you" I said. "And he'll be sad."

"I'm sad!" Pam said. "I don't have a fairy!"

"I don't think a fairy is everything. Isn't it better to have people who love you?"

Pam sniffed, and hugged Mr Fluffy to her chest. "But my fairy would love me."

"From inside a little box? I don't think it would be real love. She'd be in prison."

"It's not prison! It's her house!"

"Pam, it's a shoebox. With holes in the top. It's not really a good place…for a fairy."

Pam thought about that. "I'd let her out. To fly around my room. Once she promised she wouldn't escape."

"But she'd miss her family. Wouldn't you miss your family if someone took you away from them?"

"Um…" Pam said. "I'd miss Amelia. And Stan. And you." I tried not to be upset I ranked below Stan the cat. "And Daddy" she said in the end. "Because you and Amelia and Stan don't throw me in the air like he does."

"No" I agreed. "We don't."

Eric stuck his head around the door. "Goodnight Pam" he said, kind of gruffly.

Pam looked at him and they both regarded each other for a moment while I resisted the urge to bang their heads together. They were both stubborn and if someone didn't back down now, this was going to go on forever. While I waited I entertained myself with just that image, me dead and Eric and Pam stuck together, still not talking to each other. It might serve them right, I decided.

"I really wanted a fairy" Pam said in the end.

"I know" Eric said, coming in and sitting on her bed behind me. "I just…I'll try to get you one for your party."

Pam's face lit up. "A _real_ fairy?" she asked.

"A real, uh, pretend one. A really good pretend one."

"Oh" Pam said, a bit sadly.

"Which would be much better, because, well, fairies _do_ bite, after all" Eric pointed out. "And if people get bitten at your party, then they might not enjoy it."

"But what if she just bites the annoying people?" Pam said. "I think you're allowed to bite the annoying people?"

"Have you been talking to Felicia?" I asked, but Pam looked blank and Eric carried on. "But their mommies and daddies might not think they're annoying and be sad that our fairy bit their kid."

"I guess" Pam agreed, with a sigh. "I guess the biting would be bad, and if Izzy annoyed me she might get bitten, and then she'd cry and one of the Bella's would have to sit with her, and they wouldn't be sitting where I wanted them to, so…that would suck."

"It would" Eric agreed, probably not really grasping the image Pam had going on there of all her party guests paying homage to her. I hoped she didn't want a throne. "So we'll get a fairy, but a less bitey one, OK?"

"OK Daddy" Pam said. "Can she have pink and silver sparkles?"

"Whatever you want" Eric said. I hugged Pam, and then moved off the bed, so Eric could slide up and hug Pam too.

"It'll be a great party" Eric assured her.

"And then I'll be a big schoolgirl" Pam said, excitedly, totally ruining Eric's mood from the way the expression changed on his face.

"Yep" he agreed, sounding kind of strained.

We left Pam in bed and I looked at Eric. "Guess I'd better talk to Amelia now that Pam's climbed down off the ledge" I said to him.

"Yeah" he said, looking thoughtful. "Yeah…Amelia."

I left him to it and went to find the daughter with a whole other bunch of stuff to talk about. I almost wished it was fairies and sparkles, but I doubted there'd been any of those at the party she'd been at. Her world had moved far beyond that these days and, quite frankly, that scared the shit out of me.

Maybe Eric had it right and we should stop them growing up? At that point in time, it seemed like the most brilliant idea ever.

**Thanks for reading!**


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N Still here. So is the toddler who is currently trashing the living room. I'm too scared to look. I might send the cat in first.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

When I walked into Amelia's room she was typing away furiously on her laptop and frowning at the screen. "Hi" I said, as I wasn't entirely sure she'd noticed my presence. I was tempted to back out the door and forget the whole idea, but I'd given myself a nice pep-talk about how I was going to be open and honest and it seemed a shame to let that go to waste. Plus, the guilt of not talking to her was going to be worse than pain of actually doing it.

Well, I hoped so anyway.

"Hello" she said, somewhat grumpily, and then she typed something else before looking up at me. "Yvetta is being a bitch" she announced.

"Oh" I said, not really having an answer to that one. Sure, I'd thought I'd be talking her through the whole friendship thing, but, quite frankly at her age I'd sucked at dealing with my peers and mostly stuck to avoidance as a good strategy. I'd only had Tara, and, even then, we hadn't exactly been in-each-other's-pockets close for some of that time. JB probably had something to do with that, but, thirty years' later I didn't exactly have the heart to hold it against him.

Oh my God, I was so old. Where did the last thirty years go?

However, those thoughts didn't exactly help Amelia who was still looking pensive. "I mean, it's not like it's _my_ fault that her boyfriend is a loser and took us there." She looked at me and bit her lip. "It wasn't my idea" she said.

"It probably doesn't matter now" I agreed, thinking it was probably better not to go into whose idea it was.

Amelia didn't agree. "It matters to me" she said. "'Cos I mean, I wouldn't have gone there, if they hadn't taken me. And then I get in trouble!"

"You're not really in trouble though, are you?" I asked.

Amelia looked sideways. "Well…I thought, you know…'cos you're here and stuff…" She attempted a pretty good imitation of Ivan's puppy-dog eyes from that morning, but she really wasn't in his league.

"I guess what's done is done" I said, although the knot in the pit of my stomach every time I thought about what could have happened to Amelia suggested I wasn't exactly feeling that relaxed about it all.

"Mmm" Amelia said, nodding to herself and trying not to look too pleased to have escaped reprimand. I didn't know when I became the parent to be worried about.

Probably about the time Eric got her hooked on caffeine, I figured.

"But, you know, I thought we could talk…" I said, by way of a lead-in. There was the point at which Amelia usually tried to shut me down and force me bodily out of her room less she betray something that was integral to the life of the average teenage girl.

But instead she just shrugged and said "I guess."

The trouble was I didn't really know what to say. "Um, so…Yvetta has a boyfriend?"

"Yeah" Amelia said. "He's 17, and like, works in a supermarket. It's kind of lame."

"Oh" I said. Lame was not the word I'd use for a 17 year old dating a 14 year old. Well, it didn't reflect well on him I could give her that.

"His name's Dylan" Amelia volunteered.

"OK" I said slowly. "And, um…do you have a boyfriend?" It had suddenly occurred to me that Yvetta might not have been in that part of it alone.

"Oh no!" Amelia said, sounding horrified. "God no." She made a face, like it was the most disgusting thing imaginable and, bizarrely, this didn't make feel really relaxed about the thought of her with boys because about two days' previously it had been sparkly vampires and waiting to fall over your soulmate in Amelia's world. Her sudden turn-around as far as boys were concerned was a bit of a worry, to say the least.

"Oh, um" I said, eloquently. "You don't want a boyfriend?"

Amelia looked at me like I was the dumbest person on the planet. "No" she said. "Boys are…are…" I figured she was struggling to find a better description than 'dumb', which was the one favoured by Pam and by Amelia herself at the same age. "Immature" she said in the end. "Even the older ones."

"Oh" I replied.

"And, like, really, you know…like…gross…" she said, her voice dropping down to a whisper. I was a bit surprised at the way she was saying that, because it was old news really. There were a lot of males in this house, and they could all be fairly gross and the nominal leader of that tribe wasn't exactly fond of holding himself back, I had to say.

But then I figured that I'd had Jason around for all of my life and he'd been a good lesson to me that even guys older than myself could be pretty unpleasant, and do very gross things like go out, get drunk, throw up, and then go out and do it all again the following weekend. So I assumed that maybe that aspect of it, the willingness of guys you expected to be somewhat mature to get totally plastered was a bit of a shock for poor Amelia.

Probably it was a good thing she couldn't remember the state she'd first discovered Eric in, lying on our couch and looking like death warmed up, while Felicia made him wince with every ear-piercing wail.

And that was a long time ago too. God, I really was old.

"Why do they do that?" Amelia asked.

I shrugged. I didn't know; drinking to excess had never been my thing. Drinking to lose a few inhibitions maybe, but not to the stage of throwing up and losing huge chunks of memory.

"Do other girls like that?" she asked.

"I think…I think maybe they just put it up with it. And hope it's a stage. I mean…it's not something I really had much to do with, when I was a teenager. Your, um…Bill wasn't a big drinker. Uncle Jason did, and he came home plastered a few times, and that wasn't pretty, but he wasn't exactly my responsibility." Thank God.

"What?" Amelia asked. "Drinking?"

"Yeah" I said. "The drinking and the throwing up and…all the other gross stuff."

"Oh" Amelia said. "I meant, like, the groping, and stuff."

OK, that was a totally different thing. It suddenly occurred to me why Amelia might have been talking about Eric being scary. Luckily I'd hung around with Eric long enough to realise that most information coming from him was strictly on a need to know basis, and I guessed he'd figured I didn't need to know that one. He was probably right; I wasn't thrilled at the thought even if it had happened well out of my sight.

"Someone groped you?" I asked Amelia. She blushed, and looked down at the bed. "Well…yeah, just…" She stopped and sighed. "So there was this guy? Um, Jack…he's Dylan's friend, and he came too, and, like, Yvetta said he _might_ like me. And he was…he was OK, but nothing special, or anything. And then he like…grabbed me and kind of kissed me and stuff and it was really gross. Especially when he, like, shoved his tongue in my mouth…"

"Uh-huh. OK" I said, kind of wanting to cut her off. Yep, Eric had been right about the needing to know. I tried to figure out what I should say to that, and wondered if Amelia would mind me borrowing her laptop to do a little internet research.

"It's OK to say you don't want to" I said.

"Yeah…" Amelia said, not sounding thrilled at that idea. "But I thought he kind of liked me, and, you know…"

"It's probably better to risk pissing someone off than doing something you don't want to do" I said to her. "Um, unless you really think you're going to be in danger or anything…you didn't think he was going to hurt you, did you? If you said no?"

"Oh…no" Amelia said. "No, he was pretty much just annoying. And, you know, kind of not what I really expected."

"Well, you get to say no to anything you don't want" I pointed out, hoping she'd at least get that message.

Amelia shook her head. "Yeah, but all the guys there, they just looked at my boobs all the time! I mean, I can't tell every single one of them not to do that, can I? So that's just sucky, because I didn't like that, but I have to put up with it. I mean, what's so amazing about boobs?"

I shrugged. I was the wrong person to ask that question, but I couldn't imagine that Eric would be open to interrogation by Amelia and I on the matter. "I guess if you don't have some, they're interesting?" I ventured.

Amelia snorted. "Felicia doesn't have any, but she doesn't look at mine all the time."

"That's different. I think the guys…they just haven't learned how to be subtle about this stuff yet. And, you know, they have a lot of hormones racing around. So you might get some looks, but don't put up with anything else if you don't want to, for God's sake. It's not worth it. Not just so you can say you have a boyfriend…or, whatever." I wasn't sure what the rules were these days; possibly there was just hooking up or something, and not dating. Once again I realised I was old.

Amelia sighed. "Yeah…I just…they all thought it was OK, you know? So do the other girls do it?"

"Maybe" I said. "But the thing to remember is that alcohol, well it doesn't make you make the, uh, the best choices at times. Probably a lot of the people there were doing stuff they'd regret later. If you can avoid that, then you're actually doing OK."

"It's just so hard" Amelia said, throwing her hands up.

"You're very young still" I said. "I mean…at 14 I don't think you should be rushing this stuff. If it doesn't feel right, then that's probably the reason why. At least part of the reason why."

Amelia looked thoughtful. "How old were you?" she asked.

"Oh, well. Mum used to let me have weak gin and tonics with her from when I was about 16? Maybe 15?"

"Oh" Amelia said. "Oh no. I meant, um…when you got a boyfriend. How old were you?"

Was it bad to worry that your daughter was going think you had been a particularly lame teenager? I knew I shouldn't care, and that it was a long time ago, but for some reason I still felt like I was confessing to some terrible secret.

"Um, 18. I'd just started at Uni…when I met Bill…" I trailed off and let Amelia put that together in her head.

"So…he was your first boyfriend?" she asked, sounding a bit astonished. I nodded for yes, while thinking that possibly he was my only boyfriend, because Eric had tried really hard to duck out of that term when it had come up.

"Huh" Amelia said, and it was hard to tell whether it was a good 'huh' or a bad 'huh'. "So…what? Um, Bill was like the first guy you _really_ liked?" She looked at me and I nodded enthusiastically. So it was a good 'huh' then. She was getting the point about actually liking the guy first.

"I did like him" I said. "A lot. He was really nice."

"18 seems, like, really old" Amelia commented, screwing up her face.

"Um…only from that side of it" I said. "Now it seems incredibly young." Amelia pulled a face and I wasn't sure whether that was in reaction to me thinking 18 was young, or to the fact that I waited until the incredibly mature age of 18 before hooking up with someone. Either way, I was pretty odd to Amelia.

"You didn't mind?" Amelia asked. "Like, not having a guy when your friends did?"

"I did" I said. I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge the fact I'd sometimes fantasised about having some guy to take me away from watching Tara and JB make goo-goo eyes at each other. "But…that time in your life is pretty short. You've got years and years and years to find someone."

Somehow that thought wasn't comforting to Amelia. "That sounds…like a drag" she said. There wasn't much I could say to that, so I left it. I couldn't talk her out of wanting to find a guy she liked and who liked her, any more than I could really stop her growing up. It was one of the sucky things about being a teenager, you didn't realise the stuff that sometimes wasn't that important until you were long past that stage.

"You'll be OK" I said.

"Mmm" Amelia said, not at all enthusiastically. "I guess…I mean, you know, I don't want to get stuck with a guy who's really, like, gross."

"No, you don't."

"And only, like, you know, likes me for my boobs."

"Yeah."

"Or, like Yvetta says, like, only wants blow-jobs and stuff? That looks really gross. I can't believe that…well, she says that's what you have to do." Amelia looked at me and I concentrated on keeping my face neutral and resisting the overwhelming urge to run screaming from the room. Open and honest, I reminded myself.

"That should not be…" I said slowly "…the thing that keeps them around. There's more to a relationship than just…um, physical things."

"Uh-huh. Plus, totally gross" Amelia advised me. "So, you know, I don't want to go there. It's probably not a good idea, eh?" She looked at me conspiratorially, like she was sharing some big secret with me that I might not have been aware of. I couldn't decide if it was a bad thing or a good thing she thought that I was that innocent.

"Well, you'll figure it out" I said. "When you're older."

Amelia pulled a face. "I think…I want to rule _that_ out, like, right now!"

"Mmm, just, um…" I searched around for a way to phrase what I wanted to say. "The thing to realise is that the way you feel can change over time, and what feels natural with one person, well, it doesn't mean you necessarily want to do that with everyone. Not even everyone you have a relationship with."

Amelia's eyes went wide and I realised she was trying to work out what I may have done or not done with the two guys she knew I'd been with. Oh bum. Didn't really want her delving that deeply into what I'd done over my life. And given what we'd just been talking about there were things in my past that should remain hidden from her forever, as far as I was concerned. Open and honest had a limit, and I think we'd found it.

"So do you regret it?" Amelia asked suddenly, and I panicked wondering where the hell she'd found out about me and Eric in his hotel room. Because of course I'd had regrets at the time, as much as I'd tried to tell myself I was an adult and I could make my own decisions. And, although I hadn't regretted it in a long, long time now, I didn't want to use it as a teaching aide for How to Snag a Bloke 101. Or guy. Or whatever the hell Eric was, anyway. I could imagine the lecture title now: Perform Oral Sex and Grab yourself a Stalker for Life. I'd have people queuing around the block.

Amelia looked at me oddly. "Because, you know, you _say_ you were young…" I stopped panicking because that didn't seem to gel with me and Eric, I'd been a mother by that stage so had fallen into the catch-all category of 'old beyond belief'. "And then you got married, and it all went to poo. But you _could_ have, like, broken up and stuff, and then you wouldn't have had to be there for…the other stuff. So do you regret that? Like, that you picked a guy who did bad stuff? The first time?"

Oh. Right. Yeah. Phew. "I, um, well you know that I regret the fact that Bill's dead, and I do regret how it ended between us…but I don't regret being with him, and I would never, ever regret the fact that I had you and Felicia." I looked at Amelia and hoped that answered the question. Sure, I had some regrets about Bill too, not just that I couldn't help him, but also that I'd maybe held on for too long and married a man who wasn't quite right for me just so I could say I had a husband when my other family was pretty thin on the ground, but I wasn't going into anything that might lead her down the path of thinking I regretted having her, because honestly, I had a pretty good life and regrets were one thing, but I certainly had no complaints.

And that was what I wanted for Amelia. A pretty good life with some regrets and not many complaints. And love. I wanted her to have love too.

"I love you" I said to her. "You know that, right?"

Amelia blushed and squirmed. "I'm too old for that" she mumbled.

"No, you're really not" I said, patting her hand. And then she burst into tears.

"Oh, hon" I said, hugging her. "It's OK."

"I thought I'd be in so much trouble" she sobbed. "I thought you'd be, all, like disappointed and stuff that I was at the party, and I drank and I didn't tell that guy to go away when he was grabbing my boob and I just…I just…" There were some more sobs and the words became hard to make out.

"It's OK" I said. "We all make mistakes. Especially when we're young." Although some of us still stuff up when we're 34, I thought, my mind drifting back to Eric's hotel room. It was a nice hotel. Maybe we could go back for our tenth anniversary?

"But the important thing is that you know those choices weren't the best ones for you. So you can figure out what is right for you" I said.

Amelia looked up at me and sniffed loudly. I handed her a tissue from the box on the bedside table. "You think I can figure it out?" she said.

"I have utter faith in you" I said, and I meant it. She'd always been so determined and just blazed her way through life. It was painful to see her so unsure of herself, but at the same time, I had no doubt that if anyone could get through the mire of her teenage years, it was Amelia. She'd been surprising me since the day she was born.

"I don't know why" she mumbled. "I stuffed _everything_ up. I'm hopeless!" But although those words seemed kind of depressed I got the feeling that somewhere in there, Amelia was switching from true despair to a dramatic rendering of the circumstances. She always did like it when she got the opportunity to really play a situation up to the hilt.

"You will be fine" I said. "And you'll always have us. You know we all care about you." I brushed the hair back from her face. It was still odd to see it so short, but it really did suit her. Perhaps I'd let her trade baby-sitting for money towards her hair-straighteners?

Amelia curled her lip. "I am NOT taking Sam to the school ball. Can you imagine? Well, you probably can, I mean, you married Eric and that's like nearly the same age difference as me and Sam which is weird, because Sam's like, really young."

"Well, maybe you could take Eric then" I offered. "He's quite a good dancer."

Amelia pulled another face. "I don't think anyone takes their _dad_" she said. And then she thought for a bit. "Even if he's nice. And Eric's nice. He's a good dad, really."

"He is" I agreed, and then, as if he'd heard his name, Eric stuck his head around the door.

"Uh…can I come in?" he asked. Amelia nodded.

Eric walked into the room and just kind of hovered, staring at Amelia's desk. I wasn't sure why he was here, although maybe it was to make sure I hadn't chickened out of it all. I waited a bit and he didn't say anything so to break the tension I said "Well, it's good that you're here because we need something explained to us. What is the big deal about boobs?"

That made Amelia laugh, but maybe not so much Eric who frowned at me like I'd been naughty. "Um…" he said.

"No!" Amelia said, rolling onto her side. "No, because I'll know you're talking about her's and that's like, gonna make me need therapy!"

Eric looked from Amelia to me and back again. "It's OK" I assured him. "We can probably figure it out on our own."

"Uh-huh" Eric said. "But, um, anyway, I just wanted to talk to Amelia."

"Oh" I said, thinking we'd pretty much covered everything. Well, I thought we had anyway.

"I just need to ask her something" Eric said, as Amelia slowly righted herself and tuned back in to what was going on.

"OK" I said. "I'll leave you guys to it." I kissed Amelia for the first time in a while, and said goodnight and left Eric to it.

EPOV

I never thought I would actually miss the days when all the talk was about magic fucking cuddles, but, fuck, I wasn't explaining boobs to the people in the house who had them. And it was fucking terrifying that Amelia had them anyway, and that I'd had to witness the fact that some guys who should fucking know better were fucking drawn to them like they couldn't help themselves so no way was I taking Sookie up on that fucking request.

Although the whole thing seemed to amuse Amelia. So it was nice to know she wasn't traumatised by the previous night, but still, not fucking going there.

But Sookie left and I could get down to what I wanted to ask Amelia because I'd thought of a plan, but the plan required her help.

It might not be voluntary help.

"So, remember how you said you owed me?" I asked her, and she looked slightly confused. I glanced at her desk one more time, and decided I could probably risk leaning against it without the whole thing collapsing. Amelia had picked something fucking flimsy and I was never convinced that it wouldn't just fall to the ground in a heap of fucking splinters.

Like the dining room chairs that Sookie had insisted on buying, although, fuck they'd stayed in one piece despite the odds. I'd really hoped we could get rid of them before now.

"What?" Amelia said. "Owed you?"

"Yeah. This morning you apologised for getting me up in the middle of the fucking night and I said it was OK, you could owe me. So you do."

"Oh" Amelia said, frowning. "I thought that was just…yeah…you know, like something people _say_."

I shook my head. "No. You owe me"

"But you said it was your job!" Amelia retorted. "So I don't think _that's_ fair!"

I shrugged. "Well it is my job. But you still owe me. No one said it had to be fair."

"But…but…" Amelia seemed to struggle with that a bit, but couldn't really articulate the problem. I figured I might spell it out for her a bit more clearly.

"So it's either that, or I guess we talk punishment?" I suggested, and Amelia stopped spluttering indignantly and looked at the bedcovers. "Fine!" she said. "I guess I can owe you."

"Great. Thought you'd see it my way. Now I'm here to collect."

"Oh my God!" Amelia said, kind of over-dramatically. "We're not in a mafia movie you know, Dad!"

Yeah, she might have been milking it a bit, but I was still Dad. This shouldn't be too painful.

SPOV

Eric arrived in the kitchen just as I was starting to organise the ingredients to go into the slow cooker for the next morning. I still wasn't really up to speed with working Mondays as well, but I had one more Friday left with Pam and then, well then I had Fridays that were all mine. It was enough to make me want to dance.

"What's the happy ass-wiggling for?" Eric said, coming over to inspect what I was doing.

"Oh, nothing" I said, not wanting to confess my utter joy at sending all our kids off to school in case it sent Eric back to brooding about Pam. Now they'd made up I was hoping it would last, for a while at least. I was starting to get the impression that they were so alike that things would either be very good or very bad between them and there wouldn't be much of a happy medium.

So that could be awesome when she was Amelia's age. Maybe by then I could open up a franchise in Hamilton and live down there during the week and just come back at weekends?

"What's it going to be?" Eric said, picking up the sauce bottle that was on the kitchen bench.

"That Moroccan lamb tagine-style thing. With the apricot sauce in it."

"I guess that heralds the start of fall, then" Eric said.

"Autumn, actually" I said, throwing the carrot I'd just chopped up into the slow cooker. "And I don't think you can necessarily tell the seasons just by what I cook."

"Oh, you'd be surprised Sookie" Eric said.

I finished my task while Eric made coffee and then we sat down for schedule night. It was a chore, but it was always better to get it out of the way first, and get down to the good stuff. Like asking Eric what he'd been talking to Amelia about. I was dying to know, but he wasn't volunteering it, so I figured I might have to work it out of him.

Part-way through going over the schedules we were interrupted by Sam who announced from the door-way through to the family room "It's just me!" really loudly. Poor Sam, he'd been a bit suspicious of Eric and I being alone together since the time he'd caught Eric trying to persuade me to have sex with him on the dryer by pushing me up against the washing machine as I was unloading it and groping me. Yeah, if there were things I considered to belong in my list of the things I didn't need to know, then I was pretty sure that knowing what sometimes went on between his parents definitely fell into Sam's list.

He'd looked at Eric really suspiciously for a while after that, although it wasn't as bad as the time he caught us wrapping presents and having a pretend swordfight with the rolls of wrapping paper. I'd actually thought that I was holding my own considering I was seriously disadvantaged in the arm-length department, but Sam arrived in time to see Eric whack my backside as I tried to dodge him and Eric ended up being subjected to Sam's lecture on not fighting with girls while I sniggered behind Sam.

"And?" Eric asked as Sam came in.

"I just needed to know" Sam said, trying to stare Eric down, but then giving up and turning to me. "If you remembered the money for Subway so I can order my lunch tomorrow. Because it's Subway day at school, and you said I could. Well, me and Tray." He looked at me expectantly.

"Jeez, Sam. I forgot once" I said. And my name had been mud that night. "I'll write a note to myself and hand the money over in the morning."

"So…you've got actual money?" Sam checked.

"I do" I confirmed. "Or…Daddy does?" I looked over at Eric, and he sighed. "Yes, I have money, yes you can have some, and yes sometimes I feel like fucking Al Bundy" he said.

Sam looked from Eric, to me and back again. "Who? What?" he asked.

"Never mind" Eric said. "I'll look" he said. "In the morning. Now its bedtime, OK?"

"Yeah, OK" Sam said, and he left with one final backward glance, as though he was just checking we weren't doing anything dodgy.

"Sometimes they make me feel old" Eric commented, as Sam left.

"Yep. Tell me about it" I agreed.

After we'd finished the scheduling, I got out the good dark chocolate that I hid from the kids and sat back down at the table. Eric broke a piece of the block and bit into it. "I prefer milk chocolate" he grumbled.

"So don't eat it" I said, and Eric gave me a funny look, like I was speaking a foreign language. Trouble was that anything like milk chocolate got snatched up pretty quickly around here, but my 80 per cent cocoa stuff was deemed far too strong. Unless they were desperate, which was why I still hid it.

"I'm sure there's something else" Eric said, as he got up to have a scrounge-around in the pantry. He finally came back with an almost empty bag of M&Ms and a triumphant look on his face. "I told you" he said.

"You did" I agreed. "So, are you going to tell me about Amelia?" I asked.

"Well" Eric said, emptying the contents of the bag into the palm of his hand, "Let's just say that I think I've fixed Pam's party…" he trailed off as he registered the other presence in the kitchen.

"What about my party?" Pam asked, and then she looked at Eric's hand. "Oooh, Emma M's!" she said. "Can I have some?"

"M _and_ M's, Pam" Eric said, holding out his hand while she proceeded to scoop up some of the M&Ms and cram them in her mouth. She shrugged before grabbing some more. "And you don't need to know about your party" Eric said. "But let's just say I've entered into negotiations with my fairy contacts and I think things should be finalised by Saturday."

Oh, right. Now I had it figured out. Well, Amelia would probably love that. Well she would have loved it at Pam's age, anyway.

"Really?" Pam asked, as she grabbed more M&Ms while she thought Eric wouldn't notice.

"Yep" Eric said, watching her take the last of them and cram them into her mouth. "Now, brush your teeth again and back to bed."

"I wanted some water" Pam said, holding up her cup. I took it off her, filled it from the tap, and she hugged us both before leaving.

"So much for the M&Ms" Eric grumbled, taking some more of my chocolate.

"You could have said no, you know" I said, as I helped myself to another piece as well. Eric just shrugged. "It's nice when all they want is candy" he said.

"Yeah, and fairies. I guess we'll have to sort out a costume for her, I better add that to my party list." I pulled over my organiser and wrote 'Get Amelia sparkly costume' onto the list of other things that needed to be arranged for the party.

"So…is Amelia OK now?" Eric said, eating more of the chocolate. Well, that had pretty much been finished up too now.

"I think so" I said. "We had a talk and…I mean, I think she knows it all. She knows logically not to do the dumb stuff, anyway, it's just hormones are pretty good motivators. And alcohol takes away that layer of sense I like to think she has, so it could have been worse."

"Yeah" Eric mused, eyeing up the last squares of chocolate.

"You have them" I said, as his hand was half-way towards the packet. "No, not as good as milk" he said when he'd finished it and all we were left with was foil wrapping.

"Uh-huh" I said. "But it could have been worse? Like, no chocolate at all?"

"Yep" Eric agreed. "That would have been worse."

"So overall" I mused, "I think we got off pretty lightly this weekend; no one bailed on us at St Luke's, Amelia survived her first forays into sneaking out at night, and Pam's getting a fairy that will refuse to live in a shoe box. So it's worked out OK."

"It has" Eric said, taking our cups over and putting them in the dishwasher.

"And I even managed to avoid the topic of blow-jobs with Amelia" I said. I couldn't see Eric's face, but his back stiffened at that. He closed the dishwasher door and turned around.

"OK" he said. "Um…that's good then."

"Yeah" I agreed. "I did get the impression though, that she doesn't think I've done it. She seemed to be advising me against doing anything I'd regret."

Eric frowned. "I don't think you'd regret it, Sookie. Not if it was someone you really liked." He finished off with a winning smile worthy of the Cheshire Cat.

"Well, someone who hadn't eaten all my chocolate anyway" I agreed, looking at the empty wrapper again.

"I was actually thinking that the person who'd made you coffee might be a good place to start" Eric said, loftily. "You know, all that love and attention poured into making it just right. Quite fucking different to slamming a few squares of what's basically cocoa powder down on the table."

"Yeah, OK!" I said, laughing. "Maybe I could start there!"

"Excellent" Eric said, grabbing my hand and pulling me off the chair. "I'll lead the way." And I laughed as he pulled me all the way through the house to our bedroom.

**Thanks for reading!**


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N Yeah, it's busy here! To give you an idea, in addition to Christmas I have 6 kids' birthdays in December amongst family and friends. One of them is my toddler so I can't moan about anyone else throwing a party, can I? I also have two weddings to attend on consecutive Saturdays (organised so overseas guests can attend both), plus hen parties etc for those. And then there's Christmas and Christmas parties. It's kind of ridiculous, and I almost need a lie-down before the month even starts.**

**But at least it's summer, so yay!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Lists were good. I liked lists. My list was going to get me through this week and make it all OK.

Unfortunately Pam liked lists too. Mostly she wrote random collections of words she knew and words she'd made up on pieces of paper, but, now, she'd decided to write an actual list. A list of all the things she wanted to make sure I knew I had to get for the party.

Telling her that it crossed over with the list I already had wasn't going to cut it, because, obviously, this party was important and needed Pam's constant oversight.

"How do you spell balloons?" Pam asked me.

"B-A-L-L-O-O-N-S" I spelt out, while sticking my head in the pantry and counting bags of potato chips. I wanted to do an inventory before I bought in for the party, because I didn't need to have a bunch of extra stuff lying around.

Although I had to factor in the likelihood of people eating it all before we got to the actual party. Maybe we did need more chips?

"How do you spell sparkly?" Pam called out.

"D-U-M-B" Sam supplied.

"Not nice" I said to him, as I turned around. Pam was looking thoughtful. "Daddy starts with D" she said. "I don't think sparkly has a 'deh' sound at the beginning…does it?"

"No, Sam was spelling something else" I said to her. "Don't mind him."

"What'd he spell?" Tray asked.

"What you are" Sam replied.

There was a pause, and then Tray said "Tray starts with a T, dumbass."

"Um...I'm not the dumb one" Sam said, looking back down at his homework.

Tray didn't reply, but I saw Sam jerk a bit as Tray kicked him. The three of them were sitting at the high stools by the breakfast bar, and although their legs were hidden from view, it was pretty clear what was going on.

It was also pretty clear that the rain, and, by extension, the complete ban on further digging that I'd imposed, was what was driving Sam and Tray up the wall. They'd been all set to race back out into the garden as soon as they got home from school, but I'd said no. I'd also said no to Sam's request to be allowed to phone Uncle Calvin and see if he owned a pickaxe they could borrow, and when Sam had walked off in a huff, I'd heard Tray saying "See? I said we need to ask Dad."

I really hoped that Eric wouldn't have said yes to that one, but it was hard to know. After all, he didn't seem that worried about the existence of the hole in the first place, whereas it was driving me barmy. I didn't know why we had it, what it was for, or whether it was still going to be there on the day of the party. There seemed to be some kind of code of silence going on with the males of the house and questioning them just made them more evasive.

"I still don't know how to spell sparkly!" Pam yelled.

"S-P-A-R-K-L-Y" I supplied. "And don't shout, Pam."

"I wasn't shouting" Pam said. "I was trying to get someone to hear me. No one ever listens to me."

"What?" Felicia said, as she walked into the kitchen and past Pam, but it went over Pam's head.

"No one listens to me!" she complained to Felicia, but Felicia ignored her, which proved her point.

"What's for dinner?" Felicia asked me, getting on to more important things.

"Oh, um…pasta" I said, looking at my own list of what I needed to do. I made sure that there were balloons written on the list. There were, so I was good.

"That's not very exciting" Felicia grumbled.

"Nope" I said. "But neither is thinking up something to cook for you guys every night."

"Can we get fish and chips?" Tray asked.

"No" I said.

"Hey I think the rain has stopped!" Sam called out.

"No" I said automatically. "The ground will still be wet."

"How do you spell collar?" Pam asked.

"C-O-L-L-A-R" I said automatically, and then I thought for a moment. "What's the collar for? We're not putting a collar on the fairy."

Pam sighed. "No, it's for Stan! Stan needs a new collar for the party. He wants a sparkly one, that's really pretty."

"He does?" I asked her. I'd last seen Stan sitting on the deck in the rain glaring at us all for not making it stop. He didn't appear to missing any accessories.

"Yeah!" Pam said, enthusiastically. "Because otherwise he won't match me and I'm going to be wearing my sparkly dress, and so is Izzy, although I said she couldn't wear pink, because I'm wearing pink, and she thought that wasn't fair. And Kassidy is going to wear her really pretty blue dress. I wish I had a dress like that. It's got _real_ petticoats." Pam sighed dreamily. I was never sure what she liked more, Kassidy herself or Kassidy's wardrobe.

"Well…your dress is vintage" I said.

"What's that?" Pam asked.

"Unique, and, um…" I started, but Felicia cut me off. "It means it was Amelia's first" she finished, and then she peered out the window. "Hey, are Sam and Tray supposed to be outside? With the spade?"

"What?" I hadn't even heard them leave the kitchen. I guessed the only upside was that neither of them were wearing shoes so that would mean I wouldn't have two pairs of shoes to clean the mud off of, although surely that wasn't safe?

"It's me" Eric yelled as he arrived in the front door. Pam leapt off the stool and went running to see him. Yeah, now that he'd promised her a fairy he was the most important person in the entire world if you were Pam.

He walked into the kitchen, carrying Pam and came over to kiss me. "What are you looking at?" he asked.

"I'm trying to see what the boys are doing" I said.

"Digging?" Eric asked.

"Yeah" I said. "I still don't know what they're digging for though. And I worry about their toes being taken off by the spade."

Eric shrugged. "You can live without a couple of toes, Sookie." I gave him a look, but he kind of missed it and carried on looking at Pam.

"Do you want to see my list, Daddy?" Pam asked, excitedly. "I've been writing a list of all the things Mum has to do."

"Uh-huh. Just remember your mother's only human. She can't do everything Pam."

A part of me wanted to say 'Thanks for the vote of confidence, mate!', but I looked at my list and realised he was right. It had seemed like a good idea to host the party at home and not have to pay to have it somewhere like the Fairy Shop, but when you looked at all the things you had to organise, you realised why you paid them to do it for you. Why couldn't Pam have been like Felicia and been happy with a Subway platter and ice cream cake Eric Northman-style birthday party?

"Yeah, I know!" Pam said. "But she's getting Stan a new collar!"

"If I am" I said. "Daddy's putting it on him." No one really wanted to pin Stan down to do anything to him, least of all the vet who always seemed a bit horrified when we took Stan up there to see her. Nothing like tipping up the cat carrier and a snarling, orange ball of claws and teeth emerging to show just how quick on their feet some of these vets are.

"I think Stan is fine without a collar" Eric said.

"Yeah, right" Felicia scoffed from where she was still standing. "It's just Dad likes having skin on his forearms. Wuss." And with that, she wandered off, and I went back to checking my own list while Eric marvelled over the pictures that illustrated Pam's version of it.

I just wished that I had a list to help me cheer Amelia up. Sure we'd had a talk on Sunday night and she'd seemed to understand that she'd stuffed up, but that it would be OK in the end. That didn't really help her deal with Yvetta, who, by all accounts was now waging a war of exclusion against Amelia. Poor kid. I wished I could make it better for her.

Her mood soured as the week wore on, probably not helped by the constant presence of Pam and her musings on sparkles, fairies, and sparkly fairies and how the combination of all three was going to make her party the most awesome event the street had ever seen. Amelia wasn't exactly looking forward to being the entertainment, but couldn't think of a way to get out of it without disappointing Eric, and she still seemed quite keen on keeping him on her side.

I tried to help Amelia, I really did. I thought of a few things that might help her get over the trauma of losing her best friend like that, but she shrugged me off and went back to lurking around the house in a fit of bad-temper, much like Stan was prone to do. Bella got a lot of cuddles from Amelia, and everyone else got yelled at. At least when Eric wasn't around to give her warning looks.

So I hadn't really expected the surprise we found in the kitchen on Friday night.

EPOV

The week seemed to drag fucking on, and yet be passing by really fucking quickly. Every day Pam would update me on the party planning process, and count down the sleeps until she started school, which I really wanted to forget about. Sookie would look harassed and then try to corner me to ask me what we should do about Amelia, and the boys would drag me outside to admire their progress on the hole to end all holes.

It was fucking exhausting being me sometimes.

And now we were down to only one more sleep before the party and Sookie had taken Pam to…fuck, something about party bags. So I'd come home early to wait for the walking bus, which wasn't too bad because even when you were working for yourself, Friday afternoons could be a fucking drag.

Sam and Tray had mostly been interested in the project going on in the back garden, and I'd had to go outside to look at the supports they'd put in the side of the hole after the rain earlier in the week had caused some problems. "Where'd the wood come from, guys?" I asked.

Tray looked at Sam, and Sam looked at his feet. I waited and Sam looked like he hoped I would move on, which made me more curious, and eventually he looked up again. "Uncle Cal brought it round" he said.

"When?" I didn't remember Calvin having been here recently.

"Well…" Sam started, "We, uh, sent him a text. From Mum's phone. And said we needed some, and he left it here yesterday while we were at school."

"What did he think it was for?" I asked.

"Um…" Sam thought about that one. "Fence. We said Ivan broke the fence again." He pointed at Ivan who was sitting nearby, panting and waiting to see if anything exciting happened.

Sam looked at me expectantly, waiting to see what I'd do, and Tray looked at Sam, then me, then back at Sam and finally gave up and looked at the lemon tree. When it got almost too much for Sam to bear I nodded, "OK" I said. "Well, keep going" and then I turned around and walked into the house, pretending that I couldn't hear them discussing whether they needed to start nailing the bits of wood together. I hoped Sookie didn't hear about that, she was already concerned they'd end up losing toes, I didn't want her worrying about smashed thumbs as well.

My first thought on entering the kitchen was that Amelia or Felicia had come home, but then I realised the girl currently looking through our pantry wasn't either of the girls who lived here. This one had long jet-black hair, and wasn't in a school uniform, but a lot of shapeless black. And big boots. And when she stood sideways you could see the facial piercings through her nose and lip which surely weren't allowed at the schools Amelia and Felicia went to.

We'd never really had a problem with homeless kids wandering up the street. It was a cul de sac for a start, so there wasn't anywhere for them to go. But obviously this one had decided it was appropriate to just come in. Perhaps she'd been born here, in the days when the place was pretty much a derelict shack. At any rate, she couldn't fucking stay.

"Hello" I said, trying not to do anything that might send her bolting for the kitchen knives.

"Oh!" she said, turning fully around and smiling broadly. "Hi! I can't believe you're here!"

"OK" I said, wondering about her mental state and how many drugs she might have taken. She seemed pretty happy for someone who looked like they needed a decent meal.

I was still trying to work out whether I needed to call the cops or just push her out the door, when she hugged me. I figured that happy and confused was probably better than aggressive and violent, so I thought I'd wait until she moved away and then try pushing her out the door, except that Amelia walked into the kitchen.

I wondered what the signal was for 'move away from the lunatic who's attached herself to me' when Amelia said "Oh good, you're here. Can you make us some coffee?"

The homeless kid let go and looked at Amelia. "Good thinking" she said.

OK, so Amelia's plan to cheer herself up involved bringing homeless people home. Fucking great. Even Sookie had never actually let random people follow her home and come into the house…well, it was fucking different with me. Sookie and I had been friends; of course she was supposed to invite me in. This…this was something entirely different. Kids who lived on the street needed to stay on the street and not on my street if I could help it. Maybe she was related to the guy with the dog who seemed to live at the supermarket?

"Um…OK" I said, wondering how caffeine was going to work with the meds that were obviously keeping that kid happy.

I started the coffee machine up and Amelia and the kid looked out the window at what the boys were doing. "They're so big!" the kid said to Amelia, who just kind of shrugged.

"Do you think the garden'll get enough sun back there?" the kid asked Amelia, and Amelia looked thoughtful, and shrugged again, and then they sat down at the table.

I put the coffees on the table and the two girls picked up their cups, the kid still looking around. She didn't seem particularly dangerous, but she didn't seem particularly inclined to go back to her cardboard box anytime soon. I sipped the coffee I'd made myself, while leaning against the counter, and pondered what to do next.

"So…I can borrow those books?" Amelia was saying.

"Yeah" the girl said, and then she turned to me. "The coffee's good, Eric! Are you gonna keep the grounds for the new garden they're digging out there?"

"Um…" I said, trying to work out how she knew my name. Amelia seemed to be giving away an awful lot of personal information to this girl.

"It's a really good fertiliser" Amelia added, and the pair of them nodded to each other.

Felicia slouched into the kitchen, looking at her phone, and then she stopped short.

"Hi" she said to the girl.

"Hi! Oh my God! Little Leesha's sooo big!"

"Oh" Felicia said. "It's you." I was starting to get the feeling I was missing a piece of the puzzle here. I looked at the girl again. No, I was pretty sure she wasn't anyone we knew, and that was a fuck-load of black stuff she had around her eyes.

The girl had meanwhile walked over to Felicia and hugged her too. Felicia didn't seem to be thrilled by that either, and just looked at the floor. When the girl moved back, Felicia muttered "Cool boots" to her.

"Thanks!" she said brightly. "I like your t-shirt!"

Felicia actually smiled at that. Huh. So she liked this kid too. Weird. I hoped she wasn't going to bring any homeless kids home.

"So you're back?" Felicia asked.

"Yeah…didn't work out. But it's just me and Holly that came back, Dani stayed down there. That's OK though."

"Oh" Felicia said, and then she carried on towards the pantry and after a few minutes, came out holding a cookie and left the room.

The kid looked at Amelia. "I guess I'd better call her. I hope I've got my phone." She tipped a large bag upside down so all its contents spilled onto the table, and then started searching through while muttering to herself.

I still wasn't sure what to do with the homeless kid, or how we were going to get rid of her, or whether she did actually have anyone to call. But then the front door opened and I could hear Sookie saying, "I think the bubble mix will be _fine_ Pam, I don't think we need to buy noisemakers as well" and I really hoped she could figure it out.

SPOV

Doing the last part of the shopping with Pam was slightly draining. She had some very definite ideas about the way this party was going and I was getting the feeling I wasn't up to scratch as a party planner, despite the fact this wasn't my first time doing it.

But all that was eclipsed when I walked into the kitchen and found Eric standing there, seemingly guarding the two girls sitting at the table. It took me a minute to figure out that one of the kids drinking coffee wasn't mine, and another minute to figure out who it was under all the makeup and the scary black hair-dye.

"Chloe" I said to her, and she looked up from where she was sorting through a large pile of pieces of paper, tissues and tampons.

"Hi Sookie!" she said, coming over to hug me. I couldn't really return the hug as I hadn't put the shopping bags I was holding down yet. Eric watched the exchange curiously and without any hint of recognition in his eyes. He was hopeless.

When Chloe released me she went back to searching through her things, and Eric took some of the bags off me and dumped them on the floor, never taking his eyes off Chloe.

"So you guys moved back?" I asked.

"Well" Chloe began, "Holly and I did, 'cos the B&B idea wasn't working so well, so um, yeah. We're here. And that's OK, because, you know, I like Hol, even if she's not bio-mum, and we get on really well with each other, and she doesn't crowd me, y'know? And we've been getting into, exploring, like all these Wiccan things and that's really interesting."

"Chloe's going to lend me some books" Amelia said, having a poke through Chloe's things. "You can borrow my phone" she said to Chloe.

"Cool" Chloe said, "You were always the best at lending me stuff."

"You're pretty hopeless" Amelia said, which seemed fairly blunt to me and I hoped Chloe was over the crying thing.

"I know!" Chloe said laughing. "I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached! That's what Hol says, but she says it's lucky for me that she lived with Dani for so many years so she's kind of used to it."

"So, um, you're back at school up here?" I asked Chloe, trying to figure out how she'd re-connected with Amelia.

"Yeah, but we're living near Grey Lynn, so I'm going to that City Arts College now? And I had this free afternoon, and I thought I'd bus out to the village to see Mt Eden, and I bumped into Meela and she said come here for a coffee rather than buy one, and 'cos I didn't know if I had my purse with me, I did!" I looked at what Chloe was wearing, the clothes were one thing, but the piercings were definitely explained by the fact she was going to the alternative high school in Auckland. Yeah, that'd probably suit her.

Pam came in then. "Daddy!" she yelled, and she ran over and hugged a still confused-looking Eric.

Chloe looked up from scooping everything back into her bag. "Wow" she said. "The baby got so big!"

"What baby?" Pam asked, looking around.

"You" Amelia said to her, which made Pam pout. "I'm _five_ now" she said. "It was my birthday on Wednesday and I got a cupcake maker and I'm having a party tomorrow, and on Monday, I'm going to school."

"Yeah" Chloe agreed. "It's a fairy party, right? Are you dressing up as a fairy? I used to like that."

"No!" Pam said. "No, _I'm_ not the fairy, I'm getting a fairy. Daddy's getting me a fairy." She looked at Eric and he nodded.

Amelia and Chloe exchanged a look. "Cool!" Chloe said enthusiastically. "I always liked your dad. He's was good at finding my stuff for me. And the zoo was fun; you'll get to do that at school too, soon. Remember Connor?" She looked at Amelia, and Amelia nodded.

"Um…do you want to stay for dinner?" I asked her, thinking I had to start getting it ready and it seemed rude not to ask. Eric was looking at me like I was nuts though.

"Oh, no. I gotta get home, because tonight the meeting's at our house and I promised Holly I'd go home and help make tzatziki with her. I used to help with the food at the B&B, when we had guests."

"OK" I said. "So that didn't work out?" Last I'd heard Chloe's mums had moved to Nelson and opened a B&B.

"Nah" Chloe said. "Dani couldn't get the craft shop off the ground, because she kept trying to charge Auckland prices, and there was a lot of competition, and then the B&B didn't get enough clients because, well, lesbians are a bit of a niche market and Holly reckons we just couldn't figure out the marketing, but it was losing too much money. So Hol's back here and she's working in town, back doing some software testing for an IT company. Dani stayed on in Nelson, but she's taken up with the guy who owns the butcher's shop and we used to get all our organic meat from him. Which is weird." Chloe stopped and wrinkled her nose, obviously not liking the idea of her mum, or one of her mums, having a relationship with a guy.

Pam, who'd been listening to all of this, looked at Eric and asked "What's a lesbian?"

"A very difficult to get into niche market, Pam" Eric said.

"Huh?" Pam asked.

"Never mind" Eric said, collecting the coffee cups from the table.

"I don't know why she'd want, like, _a guy_" Amelia said to Chloe. "Holly's really nice, and guys, are, like, gross!"

"Yeah" Chloe said, "But he did have really good sausages, that guy." Eric looked a bit worried, obviously unsure as to whether there was a double entendre in that, but Chloe carried on "Of course Eric's nice! We love Eric!" she said enthusiastically, and Eric looked even more uncomfortable. He didn't seem to be that thrilled with the new fan club member he'd gathered.

"Come on" Amelia said to Chloe. "We can go to my room and you can use my phone and then you can show me that Wiccan website."

"Yep, OK" Chloe said, and she left the room.

"She dresses funny" Pam said. "Do you think she has to wear that stuff? Because it was her sister's?"

"I think she likes it" I said.

"She looks homeless" Eric commented. "Are you sure we know her?"

"It's Chloe" I said. "You know, Chloe!" Eric looked none the wiser. "She was one of the small girls Amelia hung out with at school. Used to be blonde and forget everything."

"No…I just. There have been a lot of small girls, Sookie" Eric said.

"It didn't even ring a bell when she couldn't find her phone? She used to lose everything. And cry about it. She cried a lot. Has she cried yet?"

Eric looked thoughtful, and then realisation dawned. "_That's_ Chloe?" he asked. "Like, tiny-little-cute-can't-survive-in-the-real-world-without-someone-to-look-after-her-Chloe?"

"Yes!" I said. "And she moved, but now she's back. Minus one of the lesbian mums."

"Lesbian witch mums" Eric muttered.

"I don't think she's a witch" I said. "I think it's like…an extension of that whole greenie-new age thing they used to like. Vege gardens and composts and wearing only organic cotton."

"Are lesbians like princesses?" Pam asked, still trying to work it out.

"No, they're like…just no" I said, not really coming up with an easy way to explain it to Pam. Maybe she'd figure it out on her own. One day. When she was older. "Why don't you go and get the balloons and Daddy can start blowing them up?"

"OK" she said, and she ran off.

"Do you think we need to worry about Chloe?" Eric said, which was surprising, given he'd spent all week telling me we didn't need to worry about Amelia and that she'd find new friends.

"In what way?" I asked, poking the mince I'd left defrosting in the fridge and realising I'd have to stick in the microwave to finish up.

"She looks…kind of odd" Eric said. "I thought she'd just wandered in here looking for food, or money."

"Well she wasn't, and quite frankly as long as Amelia's happy, I'm happy at this point in time."

"I guess" Eric said.

I put the mince in the microwave and walked over the sink. "But what I want to know is, do I have to worry about what's going on out there? Because the hole was one thing, but there seems to be construction now."

"Construction?" Eric asked, pulling his phone out and looking hard at the screen.

"Well, for example, why has Sam got the hammer?"

"I don't think we need to worry, Sookie. I think they'll be fine. Let's just leave them to it."

"Uh-huh" I said, wishing I hadn't seen Tray run across the lawn carrying a bunch of nails, and then drop them in a pile, and then attempt to pick them up while Sam came over to help and berate him at the same time. Sam glanced up at the window, saw me looking, and then he dropped to his hands and knees and the pair of them scrambled to pick everything up. It would have been comical if I wasn't now worried about which party guest was going to find the missing nail in the morning.

So checking the lawn was another thing to add to my list.

Pam arrived in with her balloons and the balloon pump for Eric. "Really, Pam?" he asked. "All of the balloons?"

"Yep" she said. "That's what I want! And I'm the birthday girl!"

"OK" Eric said. "All the balloons it is then."

"And then we can put Stan's new collar on!"

"Um" Eric said. "Let's just start with the balloons."

**Thanks for reading!**


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N I am here, and surviving party season - just! The toddler is now two, and we had the party to prove it. Now she's just wandering around going "Party? Party? Lollipop?" kind of sadly. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

APOV

I wasn't sure that I had missed out on being punished by Dad, because, actually, being Pam's fairy kind of sucked. She was bossy. So, so incredibly bossy. I didn't think any five year olds could be that bossy.

And I didn't think it was nice of Mum to laugh when I said that. She didn't have to dress up as a fairy and be told that her outfit choices sucked and she wasn't the right kind of fairy. She just had to do the stuff she normally did, like, open packets of chips and stuff, and put out all the little boxes of juice. It didn't look that hard.

Being a fairy was flippin' hard work. I'd done these classes for a few years, that were, like, a combination of hip-hop dancing and drama. They were a lot of fun, and we'd put on shows and stuff, and my teacher used to say I was a really good actress.

She never complained as much as Pam did, that's for sure.

Her biggest problem was with the costume I'd picked. When I'd agreed to do this…well, been _told_ to do this by Dad, basically, because, like, otherwise he'd think up something really bad for me to do. Like I think he had the boys digging a hole for some reason, so, I said, yeah, because it was just wearing a costume.

But the costume was just the start of the problem, and after that it got really bad.

SPOV

I did feel a bit sorry for Amelia. She'd had a tough week after all, and I didn't think bringing Chloe home on Friday night was miraculously going to eclipse the memory of having to spend the week dealing with Yvetta's tantrums at school. Although at least Chloe seemed less inclined to do that sort of thing. Probably because she'd forget she was mad at you, but that would be an improvement over Yvetta.

Pam, well, Pam was good at tantrums. And when she saw Amelia's costume on Saturday morning, it looked like we might be headed for one.

Amelia and I had gone to hire her costume from the place in Kingsland that did all the theatrical costumes, and I'd been thinking it wouldn't be that hard to find an adult-sized fairy costume. Turns out an adult-sized fairy costume is basically a leotard with wings on it. Amelia did not look happy about the leotard and I wasn't thrilled about the idea as well. You didn't so much look at the costume as get smacked in the face with the amount of cleavage and leg on show.

Not great for a fourteen year old.

"I don't want anything pink" Amelia said, surveying the options.

"I don't know that it has to be pink…" I said, flicking through a rack. "But sparkly was the other request, and we should do that. After all, she doesn't know you're the fairy yet, so we kind of have to sell this." Or Eric had to sell it, anyway. I hoped he could and it wouldn't be another disaster like the fairy catcher.

"The sparkly stuff looks _odd_" Amelia complained. "I don't want to look like I should be on a Christmas tree."

"Yeah…" I said, pulling out…well, I couldn't really tell much except it was made out of a fabric that looked like a mirrored disco ball. "You'd look like you should be in Abba."

"What?" Amelia asked.

"Never mind" I said.

"It's all tacky…and, like, commercial…" Amelia said.

"I wouldn't say commercial" I said. "That would suggest that lots of people wanted to wear this. Most people have more sense."

"God, you sound like Dad!" Amelia complained.

"Uh-huh, and you're veering into Pam territory, so let's just get this done."

Half an hour later we were still struggling. "I don't think the fairy stuff is really what we want" I said to Amelia and she tried to desperately to pull the neckline of the costume she had on up so it was half-way decent.

"Yeah, maybe I could be a witch instead?" Amelia suggested.

"No, you have to be a fairy" I said. "You promised you would. But we need to try a different route with the costume."

Amelia sighed, and looked grumpy and basically stood there tapping her foot while I tried to find something that she could wear. And, eventually, we got there. Sure it wasn't pink, and I wouldn't have necessarily called it sparkly, but it was a costume, and Amelia was going to wear it, and I could move on to the next thing on my list.

EPOV

Pam could be picky, and the debacle with the fairy catcher the previous weekend had demonstrated pretty thoroughly what happened when Pam's idea of what was going to happen did not match with what actually happened. Pam got pissed and all hell broke loose.

But I promised her a fairy, and now she had a fairy. There was a costume, with wings, so it was all good.

Unless you were Pam.

The first thing she'd said that morning when she climbed into bed on top of me at the fucking crack of dawn was "When does the fairy come?"

"What?" I asked, because, fuck, it was the middle of the fucking night.

"Fairy. The fairy your fairy contacts are sending to be my friend. When's she going to be here? Because I want to get dressed now. Mum, can I wear this?" There was some movement on the bed and Sookie went "Ow! Please don't poke me in the face with a coat hanger."

Sookie sat up in bed. "You can't put your dress on yet, Pam" she said. "Not before breakfast, it'll get something on it. Go and put trackpants on."

"But I want to wear my dress! For my special day!"

"Later on" I said. "Now go."

Pam sighed noisily, but she got off the bed and left, which I thought was quite a good thing, until Sookie fucking kicked me and said "No you don't. If I'm up dealing with the party, then you have to get up too."

"I'm pretty sure that clothing crises and balloon organisation fall into your manifesto" I said, closing my eyes again.

"Mmm, but problems of the fairy variety are definitely you" Sookie replied, as she got out of bed. I thought she'd given up and gone into the bathroom, until I felt the covers of the bed suddenly disappear and then Sookie put her hands on my back and try to push me over the side of the bed.

"It's that bad?" I asked.

"Yep" Sookie said. "It is that bad."

"OK" I said. "I'm up then."

"Eric, for that to be true, you actually have to break contact with the mattress."

"I'm thinking about it." Sookie shoved at my back again and I lay there wondering how much time we had until Pam came back to see what was taking us so long, when we heard the shouting from the backyard.

"Oh, not them too!" Sookie complained, as I finally hauled myself into a sitting position. "Why does everyone have to get up so bloody early?"

I shrugged. I couldn't see the point of it either, but it seemed to be a common theme amongst the younger members of the household, although Amelia wasn't as bad as she used to be now that she was a teenager. In fact she'd often complain about everyone else getting up early and couldn't be persuaded that for years she'd been the fucking problem.

Sookie opened the curtains in front of the doors to the deck, which just about fucking blinded me, and then opened the door, which made the room really fucking cold as well. I really wished all the bedclothes weren't at that moment sitting in a pile on the floor where Sookie had left them.

"What's happening?" Sookie called out the door, and then there was the sound of feet stomping up the steps to the deck.

"Fucking cats have been out there using it as a fucking toilet!" Tray called back. Fuck, his language was bad. I decided I might use the bathroom while Sookie was occupied with the boys.

When I came back out the door to the deck was closed again, and Sookie was re-making the bed. "They still won't say what it's for out there" she complained. "It's like I'm the enemy or something."

"Well, not the enemy" I said. "More like someone who might be, uh, collecting information that they wouldn't want falling into the wrong hands…"

"Oh my God, Eric" Sookie said, straightening up from where she'd been tucking the blankets in. "Whose side are you on?"

I was pretty sure that wasn't meant to be a rhetorical question, but for the sake of peace, it was probably best to play it like it was. "I might go and start breakfast" I said. "Pam requested French toast, and I don't want her finding something else to melt down over."

"OK" Sookie said, still sounding suspicious. Yeah, she was desperate to know what the boys were doing out there, but I wasn't giving anything away. It wasn't my project.

Sure enough, Pam was hanging around the kitchen when I got there. "Nice trackpants" I commented, thinking that might be appropriate after the discussion earlier, but all that earned me was a couple of minutes of Pam complaining about how they were boy's trackpants and didn't have anything pretty on them.

"Well, you think of something to make them pretty then" I said, because by that stage I was busy trying to make coffee and French toast at the same time and I'd lost interest in the trackpants, not that I was really interested to begin with.

Pam sighed. "You're not helpful!" she said, and then she left the room.

"What's up with her?" Felicia asked, as she arrived in the kitchen.

"Her trackpants are not pretty" I said. "And apparently I don't know enough about these things."

Felicia snorted. "She's right, you are really hopeless. That t-shirt is hanging together by a thread."

"There's nothing wrong with it. You've just been listening to your mother again."

"No!" Felicia said, "I was looking at this", and she stuck her finger through a tiny part of the side-seam which had pulled away and poked me in the side.

"Ow!" I said. "Fuck, your nails are long!"

"And your t-shirt is shredded. Totally shredded."

"What's wrong?" Sookie asked.

"Dad's t-shirt is a pile of rags and my strategy for netball is working out OK."

"So nothing new there, then" Sookie said, coming over to see what I was doing with the French toast.

"Oh, and we need to tell Pam that pretty is over-rated before her head falls off or something" Felicia added.

I looked at what Felicia was wearing. She was still, I thought, in her pyjamas. The top half was black with a large white skull and crossbones motif on the front, and the pants seemed to be mostly white with little black skulls all over them. It probably wasn't a look that Pam would have chosen, that was for sure.

Everyone was quiet for a while, well, Sookie was muttering while she fed all the pets as they crowded around her. Stan gave me a fucking filthy look as he passed by, but, fuck, that collar had not been my idea. He should probably be fucking thankful that he wasn't wearing something pink and shiny.

"It's OK!" Pam announced, coming back into the room. "I fixed them!"

"Um…yeah, they look good Pam" Sookie said slowly. I turned around to see what had happened, and sure enough, Pam's trackpants were now covered in felt-tip flowers. Big, kind of lopsided felt-tipped flowers. And some narrow, pointy things that were possibly meant to be hearts.

And when she turned around there was a rainbow across the butt. Yeah, I wasn't so sure about that one.

"Daddy said that I should draw on them" Pam was saying, "So I remembered that we'd bought those fabric pens, for when Sam and Tray made those flags…"

"That was lame" Felicia interjected.

"So I used them!" Pam finished.

I transferred the French toast to the frying pan while Sookie said. "And _Daddy_ said to do that?"

"Yeah!" Pam replied. "He told me to go and make them pretty. So I did!"

Fuck, I got misquoted a lot around here. Sookie looked over at me and frowned slightly, but I shrugged. What were we going to do now?

"Well, good thinking Pam" Sookie said in the end.

"Well…yeah" she said. "Of course it was."

There was a commotion on the back deck and Sam stuck his head through the door. "We found something!" he said, sounding kind of excited.

"Found what?" Sookie asked suspiciously.

"A rock!" Sam said proudly, as he and Tray came in carrying a dirt-covered lump of volcanic rock that looked exactly like every other lump of volcanic rock that littered the gardens around here. From what I could figure we out we lived about a mile from a volcano, so it wasn't exactly a surprising find. I was actually kind of surprised it had taken them this long to find any rocks.

"Why do we need it in the kitchen?" Sookie asked, and the boys looked like they were thinking about that one.

"It's dirty!" Pam yelled. "I don't want dirty things at my party!"

"It's not your party yet, Pam" I reminded her, as I put the French toast on plates for everyone.

"We could, uh…put it in the garden? With the other rocks?" Sam suggested, looking out the window. Yeah, there were already a large number of pieces of rock scattered around as borders to the gardens. One more probably wasn't needed, but, fuck, it was a better place than the kitchen.

"You guys are the worst archaeologists EVER!" Felicia said to them, which apparently confused Tray, because he whispered something to Sam.

However, that seemed to perk Sookie up, and she zoomed over to examine the rock more closely. "Is that what you're doing?" she asked them. "Digging for artefacts? I don't think you'll find any out there, but maybe we could go to the museum tomorrow and look at the exhibit on volcanoes and see if we can work out what kind of…um, stuff that rock was? It's bound to tell us all about it!"

She seemed really pleased with that suggestion, and the boys just looked confused. Well, Tray looked confused. Sam, I could tell, was trying to work out a way to tell Sookie she was so far off base it wasn't funny. But I could see his problem, she looked so happy now that she thought she'd cracked the mystery of the hole and possibly turned it into a fun-family-outing and learning experience all rolled in to one, that it seemed a shame to let her down.

"Well…" Sam began. "That's not _really_ what we're doing. I mean, if _you_ want to go to the museum, we could…but not the bit with the dresses and the furniture."

"We could go and look at the war exhibit again" I suggested, that was always a firm favourite. The boys liked bit where you got to pretend you were in the trenches in World War 1, and Sookie would get pleasantly maudlin reading the copies of letters sent back and forth by the soldiers. It wasn't a bad way to spend part of an afternoon on a wet day, and the fact that Sookie would want to hug me a lot when we got home, which could, if I worked it right, lead on to sex, was just a fucking bonus.

"Cool!" Sam said. "You like that Mum, don't you?"

"Yeah. But you don't want to look at the stuff about the rocks?" Sookie asked, sounding a bit bewildered by the fact no one wanted to study the earth's crust. Apart from the model of the volcano, which erupted from time to time, no one really liked that exhibit.

"Nah" Tray said. "Rocks aren't as good as war."

"Oh. OK. Well, um. Take the rock outside then, and put it by the deck. We'll have to hose it off before we put it in the garden."

"OK" Sam said, as they headed back towards the door.

"And then come straight back in and wash up for breakfast" I called after them. Yeah, left to their own devices they'd be back digging after that.

"What's going on?" Amelia asked, as she shuffled into the kitchen. "Why is everyone up so early?"

"Why are you still asleep in the middle of the day?" Felicia asked her.

"Shut up" Amelia said, and then she looked at me. "I need coffee! Please!" she moaned, and she slumped down at the table.

I walked over to the coffee machine to get her some, and Sookie came over with her arms full of syrups and all the other crap they wanted on their French toast, and said "I think you created a monster there."

I shrugged. "Could be worse." At least I suspected she wasn't hiding alcohol in her closet or under her bed, although fuck knows why I ever bothered hiding anything from my Dad. He hadn't really fucking bothered looking in the first place.

"Well, at least you'll have something to hold over your fairy's head to get her out there today" Sookie said. "Will sparkle for caffeine, and all of that."

"Yeah" I agreed, and Sookie took the condiments to the table in time to send Tray back to the bathroom because his clean-up had been cursory at best.

"So, when does the fairy get here?" Pam asked me, as I handed Amelia her coffee and sat down with the rest of them.

"Um…soon" I said, looking at Amelia who just kept her eyes on the cup. Tray came back in and Sookie asked him to hold up his hands before he sat down this time.

"Soon, when?" Pam asked between mouthfuls. "I want to be dressed before she gets here."

"There'll be time" Sookie said, glancing at Amelia, who was still mostly hunkered over the coffee cup.

"But where's she coming from?" Pam asked. "I mean…is she flying?"

"I think" I said, as I waited for Tray to drown his entire plate in syrup before I could have some, "She'll be coming from the bottom of the garden. That's where fairies generally come from."

Pam thought about that for a minute. "The hole!" she yelled. "Is that what the hole's for? To dig her out? Is it?"

"No" Sam said. "That's just dumb."

"Oh" Pam said, sadly.

"So…the digging's going OK?" Sookie asked, way too casually and fucking telegraphing to the boys that she was desperate to know what they were doing.

"Yeah. I guess" Sam said. "It was kinda hard to get the rock out though."

"And the cats don't fucking help" Tray grumbled.

"Less cursing please" I said to him, ignoring the look Sookie was giving me, but that confused Tray. "I didn't curse anyone" he said. "I just said the fucking cats keep pooing in there. They should dig their own hole."

Sam looked at me. "Can we get a tarpaulin?" he asked. "You know, to cover it?"

"We'll see" I said.

"Uncle Cal might have one" Tray said to Sam.

"Don't even think about it" I warned them. We did not need Calvin on permanent call for all their construction needs.

After breakfast, as Sookie and I were cleaning up she turned to me and said "So that's what the text message from Calvin was about then? When he asked me if I got the stuff he left, the boys had asked him to bring it over?"

"Yep" he said.

Sookie sighed. "They get that from you, you know. They all do; Pam's no better with her hand-decorated trackpants. They all think 'how hard can it be' and just go and bloody do whatever they want."

"Well…at least they're creative" I pointed out.

"Mmm" Sookie agreed, and then she left, I presumed, to go and do something else that was on one of the many lists she was currently working her way through.

SPOV

I couldn't quite understand how it happened. I'd only cleaned the bloody toilet in the main bathroom the day before and this morning it was a disgrace, again. I wasn't quite sure what the hell the boys did to it. However, I at least knew that I just had to suck it up and cope with the fact that nothing stayed clean around here. Eric, who had run the vacuum around the main areas of the house, was currently pacing around protectively yelling "I said no crumbs!" at anyone who dared to cross his path. It wasn't a strategy I could imagine working in a million years, but I wasn't going to tell him.

Pam was now in her party dress, and had been next door to have her hair curled by Kennedy, who was the acknowledged expert on that sort of thing. Unbeknownst to Pam, that's where Amelia was at this moment, and Kennedy was doing her makeup for her, prior to the big reveal. However Pam had momentarily stopped worrying about her fairy and was more concerned with what everyone else was wearing.

"Mum" she said, as I was putting all the cleaning stuff back in the cupboard under the sink. "Are the boys going to be all dirty still at the party?"

"They're not dirty" I said. "They're not sparkly, but they're not dirty."

"No, they're dirty, because it's dirty in that hole. Why we do we have that hole?"

"I don't know, but they were supposed to stop digging. Daddy was supposed to tell them to stop and to get dressed."

"Daddy's watching Felicia eat some crackers. She's eating them really slowly, and he's just standing there. Watching her. I don't know why."

"Oh." Well I could guess why, but that wasn't going to help drag the boys away from the hole.

I walked into the family room, with Pam trailing after me, and, sure enough, there was Felicia eating and Eric hovering. "Um…are the boys ready?" I asked Eric. He made a kind of dismissive noise, and waved me away.

"I think that means no" Pam interpreted for me, helpfully.

"Well, if you could maybe drag them out of the excavation, that'd be helpful" I asked.

"Yeah" Eric said, his eyes never leaving Felicia.

"She's not ready either!" Pam said, pointing at Felicia.

"Yeah I am" Felicia said. Well, she wasn't in her pyjamas, so that was something, but her outfit of jeans and t-shirt didn't really scream 'party' to Pam. "There's nothing wrong with this" Felicia added, waving a hand at her outfit and making the plate she held in the other hand tip slightly.

"Crumbs!" Eric yelled at Felicia, as he pointed at her plate.

"That's good, Daddy" Pam said. "You didn't swear!" Yeah, Eric didn't look exactly thrilled at Pam's praise.

"Um…maybe I'll go and talk to them…" I said, and I left them to it and walked outside with Pam still in tow. The boys were, of course, knee deep in the hole.

"That's, um…big now" I said to them.

"Yeah" Sam agreed.

"The framing's working OK at stopping the sides falling in now, but I think we'll have to look at that bit over there, as it's a bit wobbly and I don't think it'll hold if it rains really hard again" Tray added, giving me far more information than I actually required.

"It's not going to rain on my party day!" Pam scoffed.

"Anyway" I said. "You guys need to get ready."

"For what?" Tray asked.

"The party!" Pam almost screamed. "My party. You can't be all dirty at my party!"

"But we're digging" Tray pointed out. "There's no point putting clean stuff on. I'm digging." To prove his point, he stuck the shovel into the dirt again.

"Yeah, but you have to stop for the party" I said to him. "Because…well, you just do."

"Really?" Tray asked. "But it's not my party."

Sam gave him a look, but Tray missed it entirely. I kind of knew how Sam felt. "The digging stops now" I said. "You go inside, you get cleaned up, and you get ready for company. Thomas and Will are going to be here, so you can entertain them."

"Can we show them the hole?" Tray asked.

"I guess" I said, hoping that would be incentive enough to get out of the hole now.

Sam looked thoughtful about that. He and Thomas didn't get on all on the time, as Sam was kind of used to being in charge, and Thomas didn't buy that. Worse though, he didn't mutiny outright, but he made all the right noises and then just did his own thing, which would only be slightly different to what Sam had wanted him to do anyway, but different enough that it caused conflict. Every bloody time. They'd been separated a lot over the years, but it never seemed to do any good.

"So inside now!" I said brightly, hoping that would get them moving. "Before the fairy arrives!" Pam said, just as brightly. That was less likely to work, but I wasn't going to tell her that.

Reluctantly they put down their tools and started to shuffle off into the house. It would have been quicker if they didn't have to have a fight part-way there because Tray had tried to trip Sam up and he'd taken offence to that. Honestly, they were hopeless. Ivan trotted after them, happy to see what was going to happen next, and probably hoping that it would involve dropped food. He was going to love it when all the kids arrived later on.

"When the fairy gets here" Pam said to me. "Can we get her to bite them?"

"No Pam, we cannot set a fairy on your brothers" I said, hoping that Pam wasn't going to be upset that the fairy was actually part of the family as well.

When we walked back inside Eric was examining the trail of dirt that the boys and Ivan had left in their wake. "I just fucking vacuumed!" he yelled.

"I know" I said. I didn't add that's what happened when I vacuumed, every time I vacuumed. I got the dustbuster out of its holder and managed to pick up the worst of it. Eddie had been sitting patiently waiting for the breakfast he'd forgotten he'd eaten earlier, and he'd backed away when the dustbuster started, and, inadvertently, back towards Stan who was lurking very quietly for someone who now had a great big bell around his neck.

Stan was mad about the collar. It wasn't pink at least; it was black velvet with little crystals set into it. But we hadn't been able to persuade Pam that the bell wasn't needed, she thought that was a lovely addition. Stan had been less than impressed, and really pissed off when Eric and Pam put it on him the previous night. Between Eric's yelling and Stan's wailing the noise had been pretty horrific. But the collar was on and Stan was mad as hell and looking for someone to blame. In his mind, Eddie would do.

The fight when it started was pretty vicious. Eddie ended up on his back trying to defend himself and ward Stan off, as Stan went for his throat. I filled a glass of water and dumped it on the pair of them, and Stan ran off. I picked Eddie up and cuddled him, but he didn't really want it, preferring to slink off and lick his wounds.

"Poor Eddie" I said.

"Stan didn't mean to!" Pam said, defensively. "Eddie just…looked at him funny. Like when Tray keeps making that face at me, until I have to hit him in the leg."

"Now there's fucking tufts of cat fur everywhere!" Eric exclaimed. "Can't we keep anything in this house clean for five fucking minutes?"

I assumed that was a rhetorical question, so I just left it and pointed the dustbuster at the worst of the cat fur and hoped none of the guests were going to look that closely at the floor.

And then there was a knock at the door. "Who's here this early?" Eric asked, looking at his watch.

"I don't know, but weren't you _expecting_ someone?" I prompted. Obviously his concern for the floor had over-ridden everything else.

"Oh. Yes" Eric said, and he walked out to answer it, with Pam running alongside saying "Is it the fairy? Is she here?"

I went to join them too, and Felicia appeared beside me. "Have you seen the bathroom?" she asked. "The boys have trashed it. The towels are all muddy."

Oh terrific. I'd deal with it later, I decided. Right now, I wanted to see the reaction to Amelia arriving.

Eric opened the door, and Amelia stepped in. Pam stepped backwards and just stared at her. I hoped that was good staring because she was impressed with our efforts at a costume, and not bad staring because she couldn't believe all she was getting after all of this build-up was her big sister in a rented dress.

I thought we'd done a pretty good job with Amelia's costume in the end, even if it wasn't maybe as sparkly as Pam would have liked. The dress we'd chosen was probably meant to be some kind of princess dress, but I thought it worked well. It was a green velvet, with a gold brocade front and braiding that criss-crossed for a corset-effect. It had a sweetheart neckline, elbow-length sleeves and fell to the knee, so was distinctly preferable to the leotard-type fairy ones we'd found. We'd teamed it with some big gold wings and gold leather-look ballet flats. And now, with her makeup done by Kennedy, Amelia looked gorgeous. She looked like a fairy; at least I thought she did. But it wasn't my opinion that counted. It was Pam's

"Hi!" Amelia said, brightly. "I'm the Fairy Florabelle, and I'm here for your special party today!" Wow, she was kind of good at this. It was nice to see those drama classes she'd done pay off.

Pam was still just looking at her though. "Do you want to say hello, Pam?" Eric asked.

"No" Pam said sullenly. "No. Because it's not right. The dress is...it's wrong." She waved her hand up and down in front of Amelia. "That's _not_ my fairy!"

**Thanks for reading!**


	14. Chapter 14

**A/N So it's the presents that drive me mad this time of year. Not just the ones I have to buy everyone, but the ones I keep being given. In the last couple of weeks my cats have gifted me 2 live fieldmice, 2 dead birds, 1 live skink that got put back under a rock, and a half-dead weta that we threw on the driveway where I accidentally backed the car over him. I feel really bad. He's a native insect, after all. Poor weta. But I could seriously do without anything else, and am kind of worried they're planning something big for Christmas...**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

"What do you mean, not your fairy?" I asked Pam. I was really hoping to avoid another repeat of the whole fairy catcher debacle and the ensuing foot-stomping and yelling by Pam. I loved her, but she was fucking impossible to please sometimes.

"She's not my fairy" Pam said again, as if I was an idiot. "I wanted a _sparkly_ fairy. I definitely said sparkly, because the best fairies are sparkly. THEY SPARKLE!"

I should, perhaps, have been grateful that the problem wasn't the fact that it was Amelia in a dress and not a real fairy that had come through the door, but I didn't really feel like counting my blessings at that moment. Mostly I was a bit fucked off that Pam was pissed because of the lack of sparkles. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why most of the females in this house were so obsessed with fucking sparkles. _Everything_ had to fucking sparkle; fairies, vampires, dresses, the stupid little plastic ponies that had their own TV show. Every fucking thing. It was fucking ridiculous.

I was about to open my mouth to say this to Pam, when Sookie butted in.

"I think we can fix that" she said, quickly, casting a glance in my direction. I didn't know why, I wasn't the fucking problem. Pam was. I was fine with no sparkles. In fact I was fine with no fucking fairies either, so I didn't think Sookie needed to worry about me.

"All it needs" Sookie said, as she put an arm around Pam, who continued to stare at an increasingly annoyed Amelia, "Is a bit of fairy dust."

Pam huffed and looked at the ground. "Well…I don't know" she grumbled. "How's that going to work? She needs to sparkle."

"The fairy dust will make her sparkle" Sookie said. "Trust me." Pam looked wary and Amelia looked a bit cautious, but they seemed on board with the plan, so Sookie left the hall and disappeared.

Felicia walked over to Pam. "So, apart from the fact she doesn't glow in the dark or anything, that's definitely an, um, OK fairy?" she asked Pam, probably trying to gauge her reaction to the fact it was really Amelia in a dress.

Pam shrugged. "She's my fairy, not yours. Get your own."

"Yeah" Amelia said, "I'm her fairy, not yours!" She waved her wand at Felicia as though she was trying to make her sister disappear.

"So does that mean you have to do what she says?" Felicia asked Amelia.

"Um…" Amelia said. "It means…."

"Yes!" Pam said excitedly. "It does. She's _my_ fairy and she's here for me. " She folded her arms and nodded.

"OK. Well have fun you two!" Felicia said, brightly, beaming at Amelia. She turned around and started to walk off towards the kitchen. "I'm off to eat some of the brownies…in the living room…"

"No you're fucking not!" I called after her. I thought she was teasing me. I hoped she was teasing me. Fuck, those kids made a fucking mess of the house, and the pets were no better.

"Daddy" Pam said. "Don't use bad language in front of the fairy. They don't like it. If you use bad words, then they shrivel up and disappear inside…a…a…leaf…hey, can you do that?"

"Yep" Amelia said nodding. "Too much swearing and I'll poof right out of here!" She waved her wand for emphasis.

"OK, well Daddy promises not to say anything too bad."

"I'm right here Pam." I wasn't fucking promising anything. I'd promised the fairy and it remained to be seen just how that was going to work out.

"Yes. But she's here to be my fairy. Even if she isn't a sparkly one. So I get to talk to her…and stuff."

Well it sounded as though Pam was coming around to Amelia or the fairy whatever the fuck she said her name was, anyway. So that was something. Even if I did have to be on my best behaviour around fairies, apparently.

Sookie came back with something in her hand. "OK" she said. "If I can get you to bend down a bit Fairy, um…"

"Florabelle" Amelia supplied, while looking at Sookie's hand suspiciously.

"OK, so just bend down and I'll give you some fairy dust from my supply…"

"You have fairy dust?" Pam questioned. "When did you get fairy dust?"

"She's the underpants fairy" I pointed out.

"So…why don't we get sparkly washing then?" Pam asked. Fuck, that one stumped me.

"Because your dad is allergic to sparkly things" Sookie said, as she poured something into the palm of her hand and tossed it over Amelia's head. Sookie repeated the process over her dress and then she stood back to admire her handiwork. "There" she said. "I think that's sparkly enough. Pam, what do you think?"

Pam stepped towards Amelia. "Wow" she said. "You are all sparkly now!"

"Well, yeah. That's, like, what you get with handfuls of gli…fairy dust all over you. Now, shall we go and see the place where the party is going to be? I'll put a spell on it to make it, um, kind of like…um, magical?"

"Oh! That's a great idea!" Pam said, and she grabbed Amelia by the hand and started dragging her down the hall. "Come on! Can you put a spell on the boys? One that'll stop them being pains during the party…"

"So" I said to Sookie. "Fairy dust, huh?"

"Yep" she said. "Thank God the glitter worked better this week than it did last week. And that Pam hasn't figured out that the origin of all this fairy dust is her own craft box."

"Yeah" I said. For all that Sookie thought the kids took after me with some of their plans and schemes, I maybe wasn't the adult who had the most creative solutions to things around here. I had a small suspicion they got some of it from Sookie as well.

I was going to say that to Sookie, when she pointed at the floor. "Glitter" she said. "Better get your vacuum cleaner out again."

"Fuck" I said. "Nothing stays clean for more than five fucking minutes."

"Nope. And on that note, I'm off to view the bathroom. I've been told it's a monument to mud in there now."

Sookie sauntered off down the hall and I surveyed how far the fucking sparkles had roamed. Too fucking far. Yep, I was definitely fucking allergic to sparkly.

SPOV

Parties were hard work, although just keeping the house clean for five minutes around here was hard work. I wiped down the bathroom and replaced the towels with clean ones from the linen cupboard in the laundry. On my way back to the bathroom I dodged Eric who was pushing the vacuum around and muttering a lot of words that started with 'F'. Still, better he pour his annoyance into the state of the floor rather than direct it at Pam.

As soon as she'd kicked off I'd almost been able to see Eric's blood boil, like those old cartoons where the characters would go red in the face and steam would come out of their ears. I don't know what it was about Pam, but when she got mad, Eric got mad and the situation got messy.

Luckily glitter fixed it this time, although it created quite a large mess for Eric to take care of. As long as Pam was happy with the sparkle to fairy ratio, though, it was all good as far as I was concerned.

I just hoped it was all good with the boys. They were in the kitchen, poking around the food I'd made. Pam had helped. We'd had to use her new cupcake maker, which was hopeless because it made six cupcakes. Only six. And you still had to actually mix the batter and ice them completely separately. And it shaved about a whole 5 minutes off the cooking time. But as far as Pam was concerned it was a miracle of modern engineering and was going to revolutionise our party planning.

And, after she'd made her six cupcakes, she'd promptly buggered off and left me to make the other 30.

But there were only going to be 36 cupcakes if I stopped Sam and Tray from eating any now. "Oi!" I said. "Hands off!"

Sam sighed. "We were just looking" he said.

"Is it the party now?" Tray asked. "Can we eat some?"

"No, and…no" I said. "No pillaging the food before the party starts!" They were as bad as Eric at that. "But the party is starting soon, so are you clean?"

There were some shrugs and a few more longing glances at the food. "What's in the oven?" Tray asked.

"Sausage rolls" I told him. "And you'll have to wait for them."

Tray sighed, and looked as miserable as if I was punishing him. "Can we go back outside then? And dig?" he asked.

"No!" I said, wondering why this was so hard for them to understand. "No the party is starting soon and you guys need to stop digging and prepare to be good party guests."

"Guests get fed" Sam pointed out.

"Have I ever not fed you?" I asked him, and he shrugged. "Your job is to hang out and be nice to some of the other kids, OK?"

"Yeah…but not the ones who are morons, eh Mum?" Tray asked, and he looked at me expectantly. For all the times I'd wondered what Eric might have been like as a kid, it was really scary when I got flashes of it from my own kids.

"You have to be nice to everyone Tray. It's a party." Tray sighed, and turned to say something to Sam that I decided I didn't want to hear. "Alright, out of the kitchen" I said, and they left. "But don't go back to that hole!"

APOV

My little sister is slightly weird at times. I came to that conclusion as she was leading me around the garden by the hand showing me all the stuff I already knew was there. And then we got to the hole.

"That's the hole" she said. "I don't like it. It's muddy, and it makes the garden messy."

"Um…" I said, thinking that garden design wasn't really what I'd signed up for. I thought it wasn't anyway. Because I didn't really know what Dad thought was going to happen with this. He'd just said I had to be a fairy, so I was trying my best. It was a big hole now though, and I didn't want to have to join in with the digging, so fairy it was.

But what did a fairy do with a hole?

"Maybe I could, like, put a spell on it?" I suggested. "So, um, no one falls in?"

Pam looked thoughtful. "Do you think anyone will fall in?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I guess they might. If they don't look where they're going."

Pam sighed. "Bella A falls off the swings a lot. Maybe it's a good idea? You are a garden fairy after all."

"I am" I agreed. It sounded better than being an underpants fairy. I mean, I knew Mum wasn't _really_ the underpants fairy. I'd known that for years and years. I wasn't so sure about Pam. She was taking this fairy thing _really_ seriously, and I wanted to tell her to be careful or else the boys were going to tease her like nobodies' business. She might be weird, but I still liked her more than them, after all. But I didn't want to break character. That's what my drama teacher used to say, it's breaking character when you stop acting and start just being yourself. So I didn't. I hoped she'd figure it out for herself.

Or at least get some good hits in on Tray when he started the teasing, because he was really annoying, and Pam was pretty good at dealing to the boys when they were pains like that.

"OK" I said. "Um…I'll just do my spell then?"

"Yeah!" Pam said happily. "Let's do the spell!"

I waved my wand and walked around the hole, which was a big mistake because there was mud all over the place and I really liked the new shoes Mum had bought me to go with the dress we hired. The dress was OK. It was a bit itchy and I really didn't want to think about all the other people who might have worn it before me, but the shoes were new and I was a bit annoyed that now they were muddy.

I lifted a foot and examined it. "Your shoes are really pretty" Pam said, as she watched me.

I looked at her. Yeah, she didn't get new shoes very often. She didn't get new anything very often. That dress she was wearing had been mine; Dad had brought it back from the States one time he'd gone. I think his friend Indira might've helped him, because I couldn't imagine him actually picking out a pale pink tulle party dress with sparkles all over it. Or maybe he did. Sometimes you couldn't really tell with Dad. Somewhere around there was an identical dress in silver that'd been Felicia's, but I wasn't sure it had ever been worn by her. Pam had worn it once, but the colour was crap on her and made her look too pale. Pink was much better.

The dress was slightly too big on Pam, and luckily she didn't seem bothered by the fact there was a small stain near the waistband on the front. I tried to remember what had made the stain…juice? Icing? Something, anyway. I remembered being very sad that the stain was there, and Mum telling me it was OK and no one would notice really.

"You have a very pretty dress on" I said to Pam. "It's a special dress, that Dad…your daddy had to go a long way to get."

"Really?" Pam asked.

"Yes…it was, um, like a…a…quest-thingy. You know. Anyway, he had to go on a plane, and Daddy hates planes…_your_ Daddy hates planes."

"Yeah…I like planes though."

"Me too. But we're not big like him. He has to squish into the seats."

"Yeah" Pam said looking down at her dress. "Mum said this was vintage." She looked up at me again.

"Um..." I said. "It is. It's vintagely magical." OK, so maybe that wasn't a real word, but Pam wasn't at school yet, what did she know? Plus I was a fairy. There were probably a whole bunch of words they used that no one else did.

"So that's special magic, right? Like old magic?" Pam asked.

"Yeah" I said. "Really, really special old magic that you only get when you get very special pretty party dresses"

"Cool" Pam said.

"Well, shall we…uh…go and look at the special party circle then? And maybe make a spell so that everyone will have a good time?"

"Um…" Pam said.

"Come on!" I said, really, really brightly. "It'll be fun!" And then I realised that it was kind of weird to be saying, well, that like that, because that was a really Mum-type thing to say. And I _sounded_ like Mum when I said it. Weird.

"OK" Pam said, as she took my hand. "We can make a spell that keeps my brothers out. They suck."

SPOV

I thought everything was going OK. Well I hoped it was. There seemed to be a lot of people to feed and mostly I was just concentrating on getting all the food out onto the table on the deck so people could eat. I had a lot of help, but mostly they were in the garden. Judith was supervising and Kennedy was doing face-painting for me. She was cheaper than hiring someone to do it, and probably a lot better.

"You OK?" Eric asked me, sticking his head in the door. He'd been outside talking to Calvin, and, I think, keeping an eye on the boys and making sure there wasn't any trouble.

"Yeah, I'm fine" I said, setting the cupcakes out on a platter. "It's just that I'd forgotten what happens when it's a fifth birthday party. Everyone suddenly realises that they can leave their kids here alone, and all those first-time parents have skipped off to enjoy their freedom and left us with their kids. I hope no one realises. And cries."

Eric shrugged. "Someone's bound to cry" he said, and then he came closer to take a good look at what I was doing.

"I know, but I'd like it to not be on my watch. Maybe Amelia will take care of it?" I looked out the window to where Amelia was surrounded by a semi-circle of adoring kids.

"Maybe" Eric said. "She's actually doing OK." He looked out the window at Amelia as well.

"She is. Maybe she's found her niche?"

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly.

"I think it would be OK to suggest the idea to her, but I don't think you can demand a manager's fee. From your own daughter" I said to Eric, and he turned to look at me. "What?" he asked.

"You're not telling Amelia you came up with the fairy idea and making money off her if she wants to set up her own business."

Eric looked like he was trying to formulate a response, but there was a shout outside and he turned around sharply to look. "Fuck" he muttered, and then he was gone, leaving me with two platters and 35 cupcakes. I had not even noticed him steal that one.

EPOV

I was used to Tray and Sam fighting, and mostly you could just ignore it as they got bored before they inflicted too much damage on each other, but the combination of Tray and Sam and Thomas and Will was a particularly bad one for some reason, and there was always the potential for injury. I didn't quite understand what the problem was, or why the four of them couldn't fucking get on for five fucking minutes, but it was always the same, every time we all got together.

By the time I got there, though, Calvin had already broken up whatever was going on and there were just a lot of fucking grumpy looking kids standing around. I swallowed the last of the cupcake I was eating.

"What's going on?" I asked Sam, and he looked at the ground and didn't answer.

"It was something about the digging?" Calvin said, half-telling and half-asking. He looked at Thomas, but he wasn't spilling the beans either.

"Well…if there's any more trouble, then I'll be enlisting volunteers" I said.

"For what?" Sam asked suspiciously.

"Party duty. Party clean-up duty. Sookie'll need someone to help her." Everyone was silent for a while as they thought about that possibility. And then they all glared at whoever they thought had got them into this in the first place. Sam and Tray both looked at Thomas, but I didn't really give a shit who had started it. I just wanted it to stop. The smaller kids who'd been left here by their parents didn't need to see Pam's brothers involved in an all-out brawl with some other kids.

"Fine!" Sam said.

"Now go and find something to do until the food comes out."

"We can't eat yet?" Tray asked.

"No" I said.

"Bollocks arse" he said, sighing and looking longingly in the direction of where Sookie was setting out the food with some help from Judith. I should probably have said something about his language, but fuck it, I'd never said either of those words. Sookie could deal with that one.

APOV

OK, maybe this wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. The kids were mostly OK, and mostly they were listening to me, except for that one Bella who didn't seem to know what the heck was going on and kept just sitting there stroking Pam's hair. She made Pam seem way less weird than she usually seemed. But there was this one little boy, called Caspian, who just pissed me off.

I didn't know how Mum did it, working with kids every day. Sure, the kids at her classes were smaller and probably mostly cute little babies, but she still had to deal with them.

"OK, Pixies!" I said, trying to remember what that fairy I'd had at my birthday had been like. I remembered she was nice, but it was a long time since I'd been five so it was hard to think back that far. Even the dress Pam was wearing only jogged so many memories. "Let's, um, form a magic circle by holding hands." The Caspian kid tried to walk away.

"Don't you want to join our magic circle?" I asked him, he shook his head for no. "Oh, that's shame" I said. "The little girls are really rather nice little girls, and if you hold onto their hands then they'll make sure that you're extra safe."

Caspian snorted and adjusted his pirate hat. "I'm going to look at that hole" he said.

"Oh no" I said, still trying to remember to use my special fairy voice. "You can't go near that hole! It's a nasty, dark pit and you don't want to hang around anything nasty and dark!"

"They went" he said, and he pointed at Sam, Tray and Thomas who were standing around it arguing again. Well, they weren't helpful at all.

"Yes, but, uh, they're not part of our special magic circle. And we need everyone in the special magic circle because otherwise it's not special and magic anymore!"

"He went" Caspian said. He pointed to Will, who'd gone to stand beside his brother Thomas. He hadn't turned five yet, so we'd tried to get him to hang around with us, but I think he wanted to be with the big boys and their stupid punishment hole in the ground. Well, he wasn't helpful either. Stupid relatives.

"Well…he's a bit special" I said. "But you're one of us so you're staying, aren't you?"

"No" he said, and he crossed his arms. At that point I'd, like, totally had enough of stupid boys, stupid holes and the whole stupid lot of them. None of them were helping me be a fairy!

"Listen" I said to him. "You want to stay here, like I said. You don't want to make me use my magic."

"What magic?" he asked.

"My fairy magic. The last little boy who didn't listen to me…well, you don't want to know what happened to him."

"What did?" Caspian asked.

"I turned him into a…a…cat!" I said.

"No you didn't."

"I did. There he is, over there!" I pointed to where Felicia's stupid cat Edward was sitting on the grass in the sun, one leg in the air because he was licking his bum. It wasn't nice.

"I used to have three brothers" Pam piped up. "But one got magicked and now he's a cat. I don't know what she's going to turn the other two into, but it'll be _bad_!"

"Really?" Caspian asked, looking at Eddie who still had his nose buried in his bottom. That was just euw.

"Yes!" I said. "He was naughty and now he's a cat. _And he has to lick his own bum_! So behave and join the fairy circle because I don't want to have to change you."

"Um…"Caspian said, while he tried to decide. "Um…OK."

"Good" I said, and then I turned back to all the other kids. "Right, everyone. Join hands and then we'll skip around three times and then all choose our fairy names. After that, we're going on a hunt for special fairy treasure!"

"Yay!" Pam yelled. "I love treasure!"

SPOV

I had figured it was to be expected that Eric would have no clue about who Chloe was when she'd been in our kitchen on Friday night, but he was a bit vague about everyone else too. Even people we'd known for years and years.

"Who's that kid?" he asked me, pointing to another boy who'd joined the circle around the mysterious hole of doom. I didn't understand what was so fascinating about it all.

"You really don't know?" I asked him.

"Nope" Eric said, cramming another cupcake into his mouth. "See, I said the cupcake maker was a good present" he said, and I probably rolled my eyes. I don't think he quite realised its limitations.

"It's Riley" I said. "You were talking to Andy before, when you were all standing around the hole. They're all here. Ruby's over there with Felicia and Jessica who are trading ever more outrageous netball stories." Yeah, Felicia and Jessica had been slightly competitive with each other ever since Jessica had decided to start walking on the day Felicia was born.

"Oh" Eric said, surveying the selection of food available. "He looks a lot older."

"Well, we haven't seen him for a while. He'll be fourteen in a couple of months now."

"Mmm" Eric said, having lost interest in random kids. He crammed some chips into his mouth and pulled a face. "Why do we have to have this flavour again?" he asked.

"Because Pam likes salt and vinegar flavoured chips and it's Pam's party."

"Pam got a fairy. Pam should be happy with that and not have total control of the chip flavours" Eric grumbled.

"Well, you go tell her that. And while you're there, tell her it's time to cut the cake as well." Eric sighed, and walked off.

EPOV

There were a lot of people all over the fucking backyard now. Many of them seemed to be strangers. It was one thing to not know all the little kids who'd arrived to crowd around Pam and shower her with a pile of Barbie dolls, but it was another when random teenagers turned up. I didn't recognise Riley, and I'd just have to take Sookie's word for it that that's who he was, because I had bigger problems.

"They're at it again" Felicia said, coming over to me, with Jessica behind her.

"Who? What? Can you be more precise, Leesh?" I asked. Sookie was passing around the birthday cake and I'd been waiting until she came this way. If I moved, I'd lose my place in the queue. Well, it wasn't a queue really. But there might not be any cake left if I walked away now.

"The boys!" Felicia sighed. "They're fighting."

"They always fight. I hate having little brothers" Jessica added.

"Me too. They suck" Felicia confirmed.

"They don't suck, Leesh" I told her, but she didn't seem convinced, she just shrugged and walked off with Jessica again.

I was torn about what to do. I'd already intervened once and had to threaten punishment. Maybe Calvin would get this one? Or Andy, he was around here somewhere and surely the threat of the police was worse than anything I could do? Although it wasn't like the New Zealand police had any weapons. Tasers didn't really seem that threatening. Mostly the police officers here just seemed to stand around and look intimidating and it worked. So maybe Andy could do that.

Fuck it. I'd have to go. It was our house after all.

The ruckus was happening beside the hole. "No!" Sam was shouting. "That's not the way we're doing it!"

Thomas shrugged and didn't look worried. "I didn't like your way" I heard him say.

"But…it's my project!" Sam yelled at him. "So you fucking butt out!"

Yep, definitely have to intervene before any of the fairy princesses milling around went home with a whole new vocabulary.

However, before I got there, Tray charged Thomas and had a good attempt at bowling him over. That suggested just how bad things were. Tray was usually the more laid back of the two of them; it was Sam who hated Thomas' interference.

"Hey!" I yelled at them. "Stop that!"

Tray turned around at the sound of my voice, which allowed Thomas to get a jab in while he thought I wouldn't notice. Sam gave him a disgusted look and clutched the spade he was holding a little bit tighter.

"What the fuck is going on here?" I asked them all, but there was silence, as I kind of expected there would be. Sure, they hated each other but they weren't going to spill any secrets to me. I was the fucking enemy, after all.

"OK, kitchen everyone to get garbage bags and then you can start picking up the trash from the yard." Tray opened his mouth to complain, but closed it again when Sam nudged him with the shovel and hissed "He'll make it worse."

"I will fucking make it worse. Now go." The three of them walked past me still muttering to each other. Fuck, I hoped they could pick up trash without fighting over the correct way to fucking do that.

Calvin jogged over. "Everything OK?" he asked.

"Yeah. Just the usual" I said. We'd never quite figured out what the problem was between them all, but to be frank, mostly I didn't care. I just wanted less fighting and more fucking listening to me.

"I don't think Sam likes the challenge to his authority" Calvin mused. "And Thomas seemed to have some ideas about what they should be doing with the digging. He was trying to tell me before, but I suggested he mind his own business."

"Well, they're on trash duty now" I said. "They can all have some ideas about that."

"Yeah" Calvin said. "So what is the hole for anyway? Did Sookie want a fishpond or something? Or a new garden?"

"Nope" I said, and then Sookie appeared with a piece of birthday cake on a paper napkin in each hand. "You want some?" she asked Calvin and me, and we took the slices she offered.

"So…we're all just standing around the hole in the ground?" she asked.

"Yep" I said, taking a bite of the cake. The bright pink icing was kind of off-putting, but it tasted OK.

"Blokes are weird" Sookie muttered, as she turned and walked off.

"I'm not a bloke!" I called after her.

APOV

That was the most exhausting party _ever_. I can't believe people actually do that for a job, because the kids they just don't leave you alone. Ever! I tried to get a drink of water at one stage and three of them followed me into the kitchen to see if I'd make it appear by magic. Yeah, the tap isn't magic! They asked me constant questions and I had to tell them everything. I even had to tell them why Sam and Tray and Thomas were picking up all the litter. I told them they were trolls who'd been bad and an evil giant was making them do it for punishment.

The funny thing was they believed it all. Every single thing I made up, they, like, just believed. Like I really was a fairy and I knew all this stuff. Who knew kids were this gullible? I mean, I was slightly worried that they shouldn't ever be allowed out because someone could just come along and tell them any old story and that'd be it. Their parents would never see them again.

I hoped their parents were coming soon.

"Miss Fairy!" one of the little girls called out. I think she might have been a Bella…possibly. Maybe she was the Izzy. But her fairy name, when she'd _finally_ picked one had been Bella so maybe that was her real name too.

"Yes?" I said, wishing they would all just leave me the hell alone. Also that Felicia would stop sniggering and mouthing 'Miss Fairy' at me from where she was standing. She was such a pain.

"Miss Fairy, I'm bleeding. Do you fix bleeding?" The little girl held up a finger that was bleeding. Ugh.

"No, I don't fix bleeding. You need a plaster. If you ask my Aunty Jude, who's over there, she'll get you one." No way was I touching random bleeding children. Blood was just…ick.

"OK" she said, and then she trotted off. I sank down onto the old ottoman on the deck and watched Pam in the doorway of the playhouse telling something to one of her friends. She seemed to be deciding who could come in and who couldn't. I felt someone come and stand next to me. God, I hoped it wasn't another bleeding child. "What?" I asked turning around and sounding kind of grumpy. Well I was grumpy. I was sure fairies were allowed to be grumpy sometimes.

"Oh…um…"Riley just stood there, looking at me. I hadn't realised it was him. And I still wasn't used to the fact he was taller than me. That was wrong for a start. It had been a while since I'd seen him and in that time he'd had a growth spurt and I hadn't, which sucked. Now I was the same height as Mum I probably wasn't going to get any taller. That didn't seem fair at all; although I guessed it meant that maybe I could borrow some of Mum's clothes.

She had that nice purple wrap dress that I liked. I wondered if she'd let me borrow that?

And then I realised Riley was still just standing there. "So…you had to come?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "We got invited" he said.

"I had to be the fairy" I said. "It was exhausting!"

Riley looked at me, and then down at his shoes. He was pretty crap at conversation but I figured I was stuck with him as he was almost the same age as me. I'd been stuck with him a lot when we were little and he lived next door.

"You can sit here" I said to him, shuffling over on the ottoman. He stood there for a minute and then he sat next to me and stared out at the garden.

"So…um…" I said, at a bit of a loss for things to say. It had been easier when we were kids and we'd just jumped on the trampoline. Or we'd been in the paddling pool. Oh God, I had the awful memory that we'd been naked in the paddling pool. That was so wrong! My mother had a LOT to answer for. I think I started blushing.

I looked sideways at Riley and he was sort of looking at me and I think he was blushing too. Yeah, so he remembered that as well. Terrific.

There was silence for a bit and then Riley said. "Cool dress."

"It's a costume. I hired it. For the party." I said. It was OK as a dress, but I didn't want him to think I dressed like this all the time.

"Oh" he said.

"The shoes are mine though" I said, holding up a foot so he could see. That didn't really get a response from him. I guessed boys didn't like shoes. I tried to think of what I could talk to him about, because I guessed I was stuck with him, given he was sitting right here next to me. Actually really close to me, because our legs were touching. But it wasn't bad, it was just…close.

"So, um…how's school?" I tried.

Riley shrugged. "S'alright. I just go, mostly."

"Yeah" I said. "Me too."

"I've seen you" he blurted out suddenly, and I turned to look at him, but he ducked his head back down again. "Um…on the way home, from school? I saw you. Walking. Through the village."

"Oh" I said. "I didn't see you." Well, I thought I hadn't. The Grammar boys all looked kind of the same.

"Yeah…um, my friend, um…Ollie, yeah…he saw you too…" Riley stopped talking. I couldn't think of a good response to that. "OK" I said.

"He said you were hot" Riley said quietly.

"Oh" I said again, feeling really stupid, but not sure what to say to that at all. I mean, I wondered what this Ollie was like, because he liked me. A boy liked me! That was so cool. I wanted to tell Yvetta, but she's a bitch and I don't care about her anyway. But even so, I wished she could know that one of the Grammar boys liked me. Maybe he was really nice looking?"

"But he's a dick" Riley said, which didn't sound great. "He...uh…I said that I knew you…" I waited, hoping that Riley had promised to introduce us. We could maybe go to the mall at St Luke's and go to the movies, and it would be lovely and he'd buy me popcorn and hold my hand and be a proper boyfriend, and it wouldn't matter that I had to eat lunch by myself because I would have a boyfriend. A boyfriend who went to Grammar. And one day I'd get to go to their ball!

"So, yeah. He called out to you…when we saw you…but you didn't hear him…" Riley said. Oh. Right. So he was one of those guys. The ones that yelled when they saw me walking home. Probably to make fun of me. God I hated them.

"What'd he yell?" I asked Riley in a really small voice.

He shrugged. "Doesn't matter" he said, and I knew that meant it wasn't nice. Why couldn't any of them be nice to me? Why were they all so horrible? I hated boys, really, really hated boys. They were all stupid and they just liked holes and were mean to girls, and if Sam and Tray were ever mean to girls I was going to be horrible to them, I really really was.

"I, um…I called out" Riley said, "But you didn't hear me say hello. You had your ear-buds in."

Well, yeah. Because who wants to hear those horrible boys yelling stuff? "Walking's better with music" I said. "Otherwise it's boring." I wasn't letting Riley know that that friend of his upset me, because he'd just tell him and they'd all have a good laugh about me, the stupid girl who walks past looking like a snobby bitch.

Riley nodded. And then no one said anything for a while. "Ollie's a dick" Riley said in the end. "I told him that."

"You did?" I asked. I guess maybe all that time we played together as kids counted for something. That was nice to know. I wouldn't like it if Riley wasn't my friend anymore. I didn't care what those other boys thought…well, I wanted not to care what those other boys thought, but I didn't want Riley to think I was a snobby bitch.

"Next time you see me" I said to him. "You should come over and say hello."

"Oh" he said. "Yeah. OK." He looked down at the ground again and nodded.

"We could, um…have coffee or something?" I suggested. "Like, on the way home. You know?"

"Yeah" he said again. "We could, I guess. I mean…well, Ollie's a dick…" he didn't say anything after that. We just sat there. It was nice.

SPOV

I got extra helpers for cleaning up, which was pretty good because Sam and Thomas managed to have a competition to see who could fill their rubbish bag the most and come and show me how helpful they'd been. Unfortunately that meant I'd had to stop Sam trying to load all the uneaten food into his bag, just to get more rubbish and to prove a point, but that was OK. Tray was trying desperately to eat what was left anyway.

"So what was the cause of the punishment?" I asked Eric, as he came into the kitchen carrying empty coffee cups.

He shrugged. "Thomas annoyed Sam. Same old story."

"Yeah…they really don't like each other, do they? And yet…sometimes they're so similar. They've both been in here showing me how great they are at picking up rubbish. Tray couldn't care less and has given up. They've both got something to prove."

"It's a bad combination" Eric agreed, as he grabbed a handful of the leftover chips languishing in the bottom of a bowl, and then pulled a face. "Yeah, they're still salt and vinegar, Eric" I said.

Eric sighed and looked out the window. "Riley and Amelia seem to be having a good catch-up" I said, nodding at them. They were sitting on the ottoman together and he was showing her something on his phone and she was laughing. I'd felt a bit sorry for Riley, he was a bit too old to be really interested in the excavation at the back, and had been moping around until Amelia was finished with the other kids. It can't have been fun hanging out at a kid's birthday party, but Halleigh had said she'd told him he didn't have to tag along, and he'd volunteered. Probably he'd be drawn by the party food, like the rest of them were. "Sausage rolls aren't nice cold" I said to Eric.

"They are" he said. And then he nodded at the window. "Who's Felicia talking to?" he asked.

"God, you're hopeless!" I told him. "That's Charlie. You know, we saw him at St Luke's when Amelia was getting her hair cut."

"Why's he here?" Eric asked, sounding grumpy.

"He came with his mum to pick up his sister. Lily. Although before she announced her fairy name was Bella so I think she's trying to fit into that club."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, frowning.

"Cheer up" I said. "Look, you can have the last cupcake."

EPOV

All of a sudden there were a lot of boys in our backyard. Previously, I'd been worried about the boys who were fighting over how to dig a hole. But now, fuck. There were extra boys all over the fucking place. Only they weren't all over the place, they were all hovering around my fucking daughters.

I would have kind of liked to go and tell them to fuck off, like I'd done to that asshole man-handling Amelia the weekend before, but I couldn't really justify it this time.

Maybe I could?

No, I fucking couldn't, and it fucking annoyed me that I couldn't. I didn't think it was right that they could just fucking waltz in here and…and…well, I guessed they were just talking. And I guessed I couldn't stop them talking. And the talking might just be talking, even though Amelia was leaning really close to Riley and laughing at who the fuck knows what, and Felicia kept trying to punch that Charlie kid in the arm and they were both clearly flirting with those guys and it was all kind of wrong.

I looked at Riley and Amelia. I did wish about now that the New Zealand police force issued guns, because fuck, surely Andy should be keeping his own son in line? And away from my daughter?

Fuck it all. Fatherhood fucking sucked sometimes.

Pam came bouncing in. "How's the party going?" Sookie asked.

"Good!" Pam said. "Caspian said that he's going to be my boyfriend now!"

Fuck, not her too. Which one was fucking Caspian? I looked outside although I had no fucking chance of figuring that out.

"But I said no" Pam continued, and she screwed her face up. "Boys are stupid. They like digging and holes…and…and…well, I don't want a boyfriend. Look! I got a new fairy doll from Izzy! It's Rosetta and she has the pink dress."

"That's great Pam" I said. Thank fuck for that. "The fairy's...um…nice."

"Yeah, she is. And my fairy was good too." She came over and hugged my leg. "Thanks for getting me the best big sister fairy ever! Izzy was sooo jealous, because she doesn't have a big sister fairy at all!"

"You're welcome Pam" I said, and she skipped off.

"Make the most of that" Sookie said, as she left. "It'll be gone before you know it, and it'll all be boys."

"Yeah…" I said. Fuck, I hated them growing up. I wondered if we could make the wall at the front of the house bigger. And extend it? And get an electronic security system that only I had the code to work?

"It's kind of nice though" Sookie said, "Watching it all. Remember Amelia's fifth birthday? At The Fairy Shop? Who'd have thought she'd grow up to be a fairy herself?"

"Well…she does have you" I said, putting my arms around Sookie.

"Phfft. Yeah. It's not really the same. But she did well today. She's really growing up." Fuck, I wished she would stop reminding me of that. "And next Pam starts school." OK, Sookie really needed to shut up about now.

"Mmm" I said, and then I kissed her, because that usually did shut her up. Not for long though. When I pulled back she started talking again. "I'd like to know one thing though" Sookie mused, looking up at me.

"What's that?" I asked.

"What the hell is the deal with the hole?"

**A/N So Grammar is Auckland Boy's Grammar school. Amelia goes to their 'sister' school Epsom Girls' Grammar School, or EGGS as it's known.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	15. Chapter 15

**A/N So for those of you who noticed that I changed my picture, it's because I thought I might go with something festive for this time of year. So it's pohutakawa (po-hoo-tar-car-wah), which is also know as New Zealand Christmas tree because you get all those lovely red blossoms right at this time of the year. Imagine a large tree of that and you can see how bright and cheery it is. The blossoms are much beloved by the native bird the tui (too-ee), which is what's in the picture too. They used to occasionally be referred to as a Parson Bird because of the little white pom-poms under their throat. But they do love pohutakawa, and will happily sit there telling you how much they love it. They're quite vocal. **

**If my cats get me a tui for Christmas I think I might cry. Luckily they're big birds and have so far escaped the clutches of my tabby terrors.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

EPOV

I didn't really want to tell Sookie about the hole. Not that it was a huge secret or anything, but I didn't think she'd get it. And I thought she might be grumpy. And I suspected that some of that grumpiness might be directed my way. So it was better to keep her curious rather than grumpy.

So it was pretty fucking good timing when one of the kids' moms walked into the kitchen to say goodbye.

"Oh, I'll, um, just get her party bag…" Sookie said, stepping away from me and going over to a box on the table which contained a bunch of pink plastic bags stuffed with crap. She searched through looking for the one with the right name. I ate some of the pizza that was left over. That was definitely OK cold.

Calvin came in carrying the present he and Judith were giving Pam, which was a new headboard for her bed, and matching footboard as well. "You want me to fit this now, Sookie?" he asked.

"Yes please" she said, and he carried on through the house.

"Bella was admiring that" the mom said, as Sookie handed her the correct little plastic bag. "Where did you get it?"

"Oh" Sookie said, "Well, Pam wanted one of those princess beds after she saw it in Farmer's, and I half-considered it, but it was only flimsy old plywood, not as sturdy as what she has now. And the price was horrific. So I thought 'bollocks to that' and decided we could do better, and I asked Calvin, who's a builder, to knock something up and now it's their present to her. This way she's still got the nice bed we bought her, but the crown-shaped headboard means we won't get the pouting about not having a princess bed."

"Mmm" the other mother said sympathetically. The pair of them chatted a bit more and then the woman left. Presumably to get her kid and go home. Or not. I wondered at what point we'd discover some of those parents had never come back.

"I'm slightly worried that I might be turning into my father" Sookie said.

"What?"

"Well, with the whole make it yourself thing. I mean Jason and I had the crappiest slip and slide ever. It worked…but it was pretty much jerry-built." She sighed. "Dad kind of lived by the old number eight fencing wire mentality, though. He would have liked the idea of making a headboard rather than buy a new bed." She went back to moving food off plates and stacking the dishwasher.

"What fencing wire?" I asked, because she'd lost me along the way with that speech. And I didn't want to go back to the previous topic of the hole in the backyard.

"Oh, it's a Kiwi thing, kind of a saying. Like, we think we can fix or build anything with number eight fencing wire."

"Oh, OK" I said. "But what the fuck would you actually make with fencing wire?"

Sookie looked thoughtful, and then she shrugged. "Farm things, I guess. You'd have to ask Jason really. He probably has some. You can ask him at the wedding."

Yeah, I'd forgotten about the wedding. Fuck, if I'd thought this day was busy I didn't even want to contemplate taking five kids to a wedding.

Sookie seemed to have the kitchen under control so I walked back out onto the deck. Amelia was still sitting there with Riley, and I walked over to see what they were doing. "You OK?" I asked them.

"What? Yes!" Amelia said, looking at me and looking really fucking pissed off. Guess I'd been knocked off my perch then. Riley just sat there and looked at the ground totally avoiding making eye contact with me. I wasn't exactly upset by the idea he might be scared of me. That seemed…fucking appropriate somehow. Not that I thought he'd really be like the assholes Amelia's skanky little friend wanted to hang out with…but all the same. It wouldn't hurt him to be a little bit fucking…wary of me. Wary would do.

For about the first time it occurred to me that I might have got off lightly with the fact that Sookie's dad wasn't around anymore. Aside from the fact we'd probably dodged a hundred homemade gifts over the years I hadn't had to…well, he might have fucking judged me. That might have been unpleasant. I wasn't sure. I liked to think we would have got on OK because…well, just because. And then I decided I wasn't going to think about that anymore.

"You don't have to chaperone us" Amelia huffed. "Plus, you're, like, blocking all the sunshine standing there."

I was about to tell her I could stand wherever I fucking liked on my own fucking deck, but then one of the small kids came over. "Hey Pam's dad" he said, and I realised he was talking to me.

"What?" I asked. I hoped he just wanted directions to the bathroom.

"Can you fly?" he asked.

"What?" I asked again, because that made no fucking sense.

The kid sighed, and his pirate hat looked in danger of falling off. "Can you fly?" he repeated. "Because Pam said you could…and so did she" he pointed to Amelia. "The fairy…" he looked at Amelia as if daring her to say that she wasn't a real fairy.

"I didn't say that!" Amelia exclaimed. "When did I say that?"

The kid looked kind of taken aback now that Amelia wanted evidence to prove his assertions. "Um…when Pam was telling everyone about her dress, and she said he got it…" he pointed at me, "Because he flew off to get it. On a mission. So I just wanted to know if he could." He turned from Amelia to look back at me. Fuck it; I didn't even know this kid.

"Yeah" I said. "I can."

"Oh" he said, and then he looked confused and just stood there. Eventually Amelia broke the silence. "Caspian" she said. "If you go over there you can get your face painted, OK? So…go and do that now."

"Um. OK" he said, and then he ran off. Fuck, that was the Caspian that Pam was talking about? Yeah, she could do better than that. Or not at all. Not at all would be even better.

"They believe any old crap you tell them" Amelia was saying to Riley, who was alternately staring at the ground and sneaking the odd glances at Amelia. Mostly Amelia's cleavage. Fuck. "You can just tell them anything…" she continued, "…and they think it's true! Can you believe that? We weren't like that, were we?" She looked at Riley, and he lifted his eyes enough to make eye contact and nod at her. "I know!" Amelia said. "We were much more onto it."

"Yeah" I said. "You guys were exactly like that." And then I walked off the deck to the sound of Amelia saying scathingly "We were not! You just don't remember it right!"

I walked past Felicia and that skinny kid in time to hear her say "Yeah! Whatever, dude" and punch him in the shoulder. I wondered if I needed to teach her to punch harder, but then I wasn't sure if Sam and Tray would appreciate being used as practice.

Still, it'd toughen them up too, dodging Felicia. Maybe I would.

I found Sam standing by the hole, holding the spade and looking worried, with Ivan sitting next to him looking considerably less worried. He'd been on clean-up duty too and was full of dropped potato chips and contraband birthday cake. Fuck, I hoped he didn't barf it all back up again later on. It wouldn't be the first time. That dog had no fucking restraint when it came to food. "What's up?" I asked Sam. Ivan turned at the sound of my voice and trotted over to sit and pant beside my feet instead.

Sam frowned and kicked some dirt. In the end he mumbled "I think he was right."

"Who?"

"Thomas. When he said that if we keep going straight down in the middle the framing'll be useless 'cos we're just making new sides that'll cave in." Sam sighed. "I thought he was just being an arsehole. But he was right." He leaned on the spade and looked thoughtful.

"So?" I said. "Is it that bad?"

Sam looked at me. "I don't want to have to tell him" he said. "That he was right…'cos you know…I thought I was…"

I shrugged. "Then don't. What's it to him anyway? It's not his project."

Sam stood there and thought about that. "I think I have to tell him."

"Why?" I asked.

"Um…'cos it's polite?" He looked at me for confirmation.

"Well" I said, "do you want him to tell you every time he thinks you're wrong?"

"No!" Sam said. "No, he's enough of a douchebag as it is. I want him to just back off."

"So then, if he's not going to know, and you don't need to use his advice in the future, then just leave it. Let him keep thinking you didn't need his help."

Sam thought for a moment. "But what if I do?" he asked. "What if I do want his help sometime…y'know? Maybe he could be useful. And then if thinks I thought he was a just an idiot, he's not going to do anything useful…is he?"

"Probably not" I said. "And that's the tough bit, knowing when to back down and keep someone on side so they'll help. Even if you don't need that help now."

Sam sighed. "Well how come you don't then?" he challenged. "Mum always says you stick to your guns and never admit you were wrong. You hear her muttering about it all the time." And then he stopped suddenly, obviously worried he'd given one of Sookie's secrets away. It wasn't really a secret. She did a lot of loud and pointed muttering at times.

"Mostly…" I said. "I'm right. So that helps."

Sam looked thoughtful again and Tray walked over with his mouth full of leftover party food. "What's happening?" he asked. At least, that would be my interpretation of what he said because who the fuck could really tell with that much food crammed in there.

Sam sighed. "Thomas was right, I think."

"Oh" Tray said, looking at the hole. Then he shrugged. It didn't seem to bother him. "So are we digging?" he asked, holding out his hand for the spade.

And then behind me Sookie's voice said. "Yeah, but what I'd like to know is, what the hell _are_ you guys digging anyway?"

"Hole" Tray said. "We're digging the hole, Mum." Sam had been staring at the ground trying to work out what to tell his mom, so thank fuck one of them was literal to the core.

"But what's it for?" she asked. "I've watched all afternoon and everyone keeps coming down here to look…well, the blokes do, anyway, and I don't know why. What is so fascinating about that bloody great hole?" Sookie looked from me to Sam and back again.

Sam started to look uncomfortable, and I realised it might be time to pull the plug on all of this before it drove Sookie insane. Or she got so annoyed she forgot all the vacuuming I'd done that morning, because it was a fuckload of work by the time I had to get the glitter as well.

"It's a really good hole" I said, looking over at Sam and Tray.

"It is?" Sam asked, stepping back and surveying it.

"I think it needs more framing over there" Tray added, pointing with the spade he'd taken off Sam.

"No. No, I think it's great the way it is" I said to them, while Sookie looked from me to Sam again. She still wasn't getting it.

"I think, maybe, we could have done better…" Sam said slowly, walking around the hole.

"Nope. It's great the way it is. Well done. You guys said you could do it, and you did."

"Yeah" Sam said. "We did." He smiled and looked really fucking pleased with himself.

"We did?" Tray asked.

"Well, you did all this work" I said to them. "So, you know. Well done. I'm really proud of you guys."

Sam looked down at the ground, but he looked pleased. Tray seemed to be considering something. "So now…we stop?" Tray asked.

"Well it's a good hole. You said you could dig one, and you have. So yeah, you can stop. And figure out the best way to fill it back in again."

"Um…OK. Yeah, we can do that" Sam said, and then he went to take the spade back off Tray and discuss tactics. I turned to look at Sookie and she looked downright confused. "That's it?" she asked.

"That's what?" I asked her in response.

"The hole…that's it? They just fill it in now? But what was it for? What were they doing? Why are they stopping now? Why are they so happy you made them stop?" She sighed. "I really don't get it" she said quietly, and she sounded sad about that.

"Come on" I said, taking her hand and walking back towards the house. Ivan started to follow, but got distracted by the line of kids that were skipping through the backyard behind Pam and went to bark at them.

"I'm completely lost" Sookie grumbled.

"No you're not, there's the house. Look! I think we can find our way from here."

"Oh, yeah. Ha, ha, Eric."

"I think you're supposed to punch me in the shoulder about now" I commented, as we passed Felicia and her new friend again.

"Why?" Sookie asked. "I'm confused not annoyed. Well, slightly annoyed. I feel a bit left out of it. But not enough to punch you. And anyway, your shoulder's all bony. If I was going to punch you, I'd go for a softer bit."

Yeah, obviously Sookie was missing a lot of things this afternoon. I'd at least expected some giggling at me, like Amelia was demonstrating over on the ottoman with Riley. Still. Didn't Andy have to fucking go to work soon? But instead all I was stuck with was a completely puzzled Sookie.

"Well, they wanted to dig a hole" I said, and Sookie frowned.

"But what _for_?" she asked. "Why did we need a hole?"

I shrugged. "I think they saw the guys laying the cables a few streets over, where they're digging up the grass next to the sidewalk…"

"Footpath" Sookie interjected. She really couldn't help herself. Perhaps I should be punching her in the arm.

"So, anyway…" I continued, "…they were discussing how easy it would be to dig a hole without a digger, and they thought they could do it, so I said, sure, go on, show me."

"You…what?"

"I said do it then. Dig the hole and show me how great it turns out. What?"

Sookie was standing there shaking her head, but she was at least smiling now, rather than looking completely puzzled about it all. "So they dug the hole just to prove to you that they could dig a hole and once it had your seal of approval as a hole it was finished?"

"Well…I guess" I said. "They were going to dig it anyway, better to give them some kind of goal in doing it. And you have to admit, they've been getting on great while they've been working on it."

"Yeah. I guess they have" Sookie agreed.

"And they did work really fucking hard at it" I said. "As soon as I said I wasn't sure they could do it, they were pretty fucking gung-ho about the whole thing. I think they wanted to prove me wrong."

"Mmm" Sookie said. "Can't think where they would have inherited that little trait."

"What?" I asked. I hadn't dug any fucking holes in the backyard. I didn't need to, clearly. Not while the boys were around. "Anyway, all their creative solutions, that's totally from their mother."

"Uh-huh" Sookie said, but she was a bit distracted now by the fact Kennedy was walking over.

"I'm off!" she said, cheerfully. "But…uh, Kassidy doesn't want to come. So just point her back towards home when it's all over."

"Oh, OK" Sookie said. "No problem. I think Pam's enjoying having all the girls following her around."

"Yeah" Kennedy said, "I guess that's the joy of being the birthday girl. You get a retinue for the day."

Well I hoped it was just for the day. Some of these kids had been here a long time, and some of those parents didn't seem to show any enthusiasm for coming back to collect their kids any time soon. This day was fucking exhausting.

And Riley was still sitting there with Amelia. What was so fascinating about his fucking phone anyway?

SPOV

It took what seemed like hours and hours for everyone to finally go home. The kids were having too much fun, and so, apparently were the parents. Wherever the heck they'd all buggered off to. For a while there I thought I was going to get stuck with some little boy called Caspian permanently, and I was scrambling around to try to find his mum's phone number so I could call her when she finally showed up. Caspian didn't really want to go though, he'd gone to join the boys at the hole and, apparently, filling it back in was nearly as exciting as digging it in the first place.

I couldn't quite wrap my head around the fact that there wasn't any grand design to the hole other than the hole itself. And getting Eric's approval on the hole. It seemed like such a pointless exercise, and, sure, I guess it had kept them occupied, but wouldn't they want to actually do something that had a purpose, rather than just randomly dig to prove a point? I didn't get it, and that fact made me feel kind of left out of the whole thing. It was like Eric was running a weird little empire right under my nose sometimes.

Halleigh came to say goodbye as they had to go so Andy could get ready for work. "I'm tempted to leave Riley here" she said. "He seems to be getting on OK with Amelia and at home he's just a pain most of the time now. I barely get two words out of him."

"I'm surprised he's not down surveying the earthworks" I said. "All the blokes seem to really love that."

"Yeah" Halleigh said. "Andy said you were getting a fishpond, or something?"

"Just a hole" I said. "The boys decided to dig it to show Eric they could dig it. No, I don't get it either." Halleigh looked confused about the whole thing.

"So they were just digging…for the sake of digging?" she asked.

"Yeah, apparently. I guess it kept them amused. And I got a new rock for the garden out of it." Halleigh continued to look confused. I knew how she felt.

Halleigh walked up to the deck to tell Riley it was time to go home and he didn't look thrilled about that. I could see that Amelia was busy putting her number into his phone and it suddenly occurred to me that they weren't exactly three years old anymore. I'd thought Amelia was off boys but I guess hormones were pretty powerful. Oh well. There wasn't much I could do about and I doubted Riley was going to do anything terrible to Amelia. I doubted Riley would get a word in around Amelia, quite frankly. They'd be perfect for each other.

Even if it still made me a bit sad that they were so grown up now.

When Calvin and Judith left it was even more bizarre. Thomas, who'd been banned from the hole earlier in the afternoon, had gone back there, because, I think, it was that or hang around with Pam and Pam's small troop of followers who insisted on yelling "Stinky, stinky boy!" to any males who crossed their paths. They couldn't be persuaded that it wasn't a polite thing to do and, having been made a fuss of and generally showered with presents, Pam had given up all pretence of politeness and was now thoroughly occupied with running the entire show.

I was going to leave Eric to deal with her. Later on, perhaps, when the guests wouldn't have to witness the ensuing fireworks that would accompany that encounter.

In the meantime, I went to thank Judith for her help and to say how much we all loved Pam's present. Kennedy had been making noises about getting something similar for Kassidy's room, although she'd wandered off into musing about turning the bed into a four-poster as well, which made Calvin look a bit worried. Cutting a crown shape out of plywood was one thing, remodelling an entire bed was quite another.

Tray was working hard at moving all the dirt back into the hole and Sam was dismantling some of the framing with the claw part of the hammer. Thomas was standing watching them warily. I said goodbye to Calvin and Judith, Judith told Calvin for about the hundredth time that they were actually going and Jessie was already in the car waiting for them, but Calvin kept on chatting to Eric regardless. Will just sat on the ground pulling everything out of his party bag to examine it more closely.

"We really do have to get going now" Judith said. "I think we're the last ones left." Yeah, they were pretty much always the last ones left, but I was used to it by now.

"Yah…we're going" Calvin said, not moving a muscle.

"Muuum!" Jessica called from round the side of the house. "Can I go for a walk with Leesha?"

"No" Judith called back. "We're going soon."

I didn't hear what Jessica said after that, but it sounded a bit huffy. "So thanks again" I said, not sure what else to do when we were all just standing there. Calvin and Eric were discussing Calvin's business. After helping us with our renovations he'd slowly set up his own business managing the renovations of other clients and was doing quite well as a specialist in bungalows and villas. From time to time he liked to ask Eric's advice on things though, and Eric was always more than happy to give it. This just wasn't maybe the best time.

"We'd better let them get going" I said to Eric.

"Mmm" he said, ignoring me and carrying on with his conversation.

"You could just leave without them" I suggested to Judith.

"You want all three of them?" she asked. "Because I think Will just went inside to fill his new water pistol." Yeah, he'd disappeared while no one was watching him. And then we heard Pam scream which suggested where he'd headed next. Will liked Pam because she was the only one who was his size and he didn't feel like he had to be nice to her. Pam didn't like Will for pretty much the same reason.

"I would be scared about the amount of holes the garden would have" I said to Judith. "It seems to be a favourite activity around here."

"Yeah…" Judith said. "But its keeping them occupied. Maybe I'll suggest it to Will and Thomas. Although it might be better to suggest that they borrow Cal's tools and build another room on the house, next time they have a fight over sharing a bedroom. God knows, I've had enough of that one." Yeah, that wouldn't be fun. At least Sam and Tray seemed pretty resigned to the fact their sisters all had their own rooms and they were stuck sharing.

"OK, guys. Let's get going" Calvin said suddenly, as though he'd just thought of the idea. We rounded up all the kids to say goodbye, which they were all a bit reluctant to do. Amelia didn't even want to come out of the house at this point in the afternoon. I think being a fairy had worn her out totally, and now she was changed back into her own clothes, glued to her phone, and back to not caring what any of us said to her. It was kind of nice to have her back.

"Bye" Sam said when it was his turn.

"Yeah. Bye" Thomas said, neither of them really making eye contact.

"It might've worked" Sam said, still not looking at him. "Your idea. 'Cos it was getting pretty big. But we've decided to, uh, redesign it now anyway. Thanks for your input though." Huh. Sam had picked up consultant-speak from Eric. That was really weird, but I guessed inevitable.

"Yeah. It's a good fucking hole, eh Dad?" Tray asked, demonstrating what he'd picked up from Eric.

Thomas just said "OK. See you then" to Sam and walked over to me. "Thanks for having me, Aunt Sookie" he said. "I had a very nice time."

"Oh. You're welcome Thomas" I said, a bit stunned by his politeness. I only hoped it might rub off on my kids, but I doubted it. Will was currently trying to murder Pam with a fairy wand, and Jessica had wandered down to the park at the end of the road with Felicia despite Judith saying no earlier, so it hadn't even rubbed off on his siblings. For some reason, he was the only one who actually paid attention to Lorena.

I gave him a hug, ignoring Sam's glare at the pair of us. "It was lovely to have you over. You can come anytime." I'm pretty sure Sam rolled his eyes at that one. Thomas looked kind of pleased, but didn't say anything else, just followed his mum to the car.

Somehow though, even when we managed to get back to it just being our family in the house, my work still wasn't done. There was the last of the clean-up to do, and I had to go down and point out to the boys that they couldn't leave bits of wood with nails sticking up out of them just lying around. There were pets to feed, and Stan to hide from Pam after he arrived in minus his new collar and looking especially pleased with himself. I had to get dinner for everyone. Even though they weren't all that hungry after the party food they still expected me to feed them.

So I was pleased when it was nearly bedtime and I could get into the shower and wash the day off me. The warm water was nice and relaxing, and I didn't really even mind when Eric opened the shower door and said "It's me" as he stepped in while I was rinsing my hair.

"I know" I said to him, when I opened my eyes. "I very rarely shriek these days."

Eric just shrugged and turned on the jets on the opposite side of the shower, which was preferable to shoving me out of the way so he could get to the water like he'd used to do at the old house. "Everyone settled?" I asked.

"Amelia had to be told to put the phone away and go to sleep" he said. "Other than that, they were OK." Eric reached for the shower gel and poured some out.

"Good" I said. "It's been a long and tiring day."

"It has" Eric agreed, and he stood behind me and started massaging my shoulders. That felt really good.

"But I think she enjoyed it" I said, leaning back into Eric's hands.

"Who?" Eric asked.

"Pam!" I looked over my shoulder at him. "Who'd you think? After all that build-up I was worried that it wasn't going to be as good as she hoped, but I think she enjoyed it. She was out like a light. She hasn't even noticed that Stan's missing the collar, so thankfully, we didn't have to end on that note."

"Hmmm" Eric said, sounding preoccupied. He was still working on my shoulders though, so I wasn't going to complain that he was maybe thinking of something else.

"And at least I don't have to worry about the hole now" I said. "Although I don't understand it at all. Proving a point by digging a hole? I think you need a Y chromosome to get that one." Eric still didn't say anything, but he kept massaging, so I just relaxed. But then he stepped a bit closer to me, so he was right up against my back, and he started kissing my neck.

At that point I got a bit less relaxed and a lot more turned on.

"That's nice" I said.

"I know" Eric murmured. He moved one hand from my shoulder down to my hip, and held me against him even tighter than before. I could feel he was enjoying this too.

"You're nice" I said to him.

"I vacuumed" he muttered between kisses.

"I wasn't thinking of that" I said. "But it did help."

Eric didn't reply to that, other than to move his other hand away from my shoulder and reach around and squeeze my breast. I tried not to pay attention to the fact that he had to reach lower with each passing year. Gravity was not my friend. Eric so far hadn't noticed anyway, or, he hadn't said he'd noticed, so I wasn't about to point it out to him.

By this stage I was starting to feel like I wanted more. So I grabbed Eric's hand, the one on my hip, and placed it between my legs, rocking against it. It was so much better with some friction.

As I did that, Eric made a noise behind me which I'm pretty sure was a noise of appreciation. For all that he liked to tease me about being insatiable, or that he was only here to fulfil the ideas my 'little books of porn' put in my poor sex-addled brain, he always did like it if I took a little bit of the initiative during sex. It seemed a silly thing really for him to want to know that I wanted him, especially when he still had the mums of Pam's friends going giddy over him when they came to pick up their children from us, but I knew that he needed me to show it as much as he needed me to say it. And that was just the way it was.

I'm sure if you asked Eric, he'd be able to list a few things he'd figured out about me too. But I wasn't dumb enough to ask him. As long as we worked as a couple it really didn't matter.

And with an orgasm fast approaching, I didn't really want to think anymore anyway. I just wanted to concentrate on Eric, the water, Eric's hand, the movement of my hips, the way his breath felt on my neck, the fact I could feel his erection pressing into my lower back and the desperate need I felt to plummet over that edge I could just about feel approaching.

And then it hit. And it was bloody good.

"Feeling better?" Eric asked, sounding breathless, as though he was the one who'd just come.

"Yeah" I said, my legs feeling shaky now. I didn't really want to stand around in the shower any longer. "Bed" I said. "Come on."

Eric looked fleetingly at the seat at the back of the shower, but I couldn't face that tonight. I wanted my nice comfy bed and not to have to fuss with lube and to worry if my knees were going to slip from under me. "OK" he said. "I'll even let you be on top." Yeah, that was Eric's code for he wanted me to be on top, but I'd go with it. It wasn't exactly the worst thing he could do to me.

As I stepped out of the shower and wrapped myself in a towel, trying to quickly get myself as dry as possible, I shivered. "Cold?" Eric asked.

"Mostly horny" I said truthfully. The cold air on wet skin had set my nerves alight and I was feeling the need for another orgasm. Soon.

"Even better" Eric said, eyeing my nipples, and making a half-hearted attempt to dry himself. I stepped over and kissed one of his nipples, and he dropped the towel completely, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the bedroom.

"I'm not really dry" I complained.

"You can air-dry" Eric said. "When you're on top. Or not. You're pretty hot when you're wet."

I giggled and Eric lay down on the bed and looked at me expectantly. I climbed over him and got into the right position and it was definitely much better when he was inside me. Much, much better.

"That's good" I said.

"Yep" Eric agreed, reaching over to grab my boobs with both hands. "In case they're cold" he said. "I'll keep them warm." I giggled again and Eric said "I'm glad you've got the giggle back" before I started moving. And that was good too. Especially once I leaned over and put my hands on Eric's chest and set my own rhythm, working towards another orgasm. And that was another thing I liked about Eric. Sure the vacuuming skills were handy, but right at that moment, I was happy he was letting me take the lead because I was just about, almost, in fact right…right there.

I lay down with my face on Eric's chest, kissing his skin. And then he flipped us over.

EPOV

Sex with Sookie was always fucking fantastic, even after all this time. Sure, maybe it wasn't always inventive and dirty these days, but there was something to be said for knowing how to get someone off, and for knowing that, in return, they could get you off too.

And I'd never fucking get sick of getting Sookie off. Even if she kind of liked to do it herself. I'd learnt long ago that if I let her set the pace it was a win-win situation. She'd come and I'd fucking enjoy watching her come.

It was still fucking amazing being inside her, every time. More than the feeling though, of my cock inside her, and how great that fucking felt, I loved that she smiled, that she still smiled like this was the best fucking thing we could be doing and she was so fucking pleased to be doing it with me. That was my smile, the one only I got, and it was almost as much of a turn-on as watching her breasts bounce as she rode me.

And when she came, that was fucking amazing too.

I rolled us over so Sookie was on her back. "Ooh, fun" she commented, and she laughed and kissed my chest, and as nice as it was, lying there, feeling her boobs and how soft they were all squashed against me, and how hard the nipples were that were poking into me, I thought that about now, I needed a bit more.

So I pulled out. And pushed back in again.

"Yeah…" Sookie sighed, languidly, shifting her hips underneath me and holding me tighter with the legs that she'd wrapped around my back. "Nice" she said slowly, as I thrust again. She held me tightly in the cradle of her hips and I was surrounded by nothing by Sookie; her heat, her wetness, the sighs she was making, her hands gripping my back, her hair tickling my nose, and the friction from where we were joined. That fucking delicious friction that was going to send me right over into my own orgasm any fucking minute. Any fucking minute. I was so close.

And then I came. And Sookie held me close and ran her nails lightly up my back and murmured "I feel sooo much better now" and kissed my collarbone and I really, really fucking liked that part too.

**A/N Farmer's (which used to be known by it's full name The Farmer's Trading Company, which probably makes more sense) is a department store.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	16. Chapter 16

**A/N I am surviving, just. It's sooo busy here, it's not funny. And every time I turn around the toddler is clutching some Christmas ornaments and denying they came off the tree, which is dropping needles everywhere as it slowly dies in my stifling hot house. I can't wait until it's all over at this point in time. **

**But the toddler has coined a new phrase. She keeps wandering around saying "I a baby-person" which is kind of cute, and, I think, a step-up from "I a pwincess!" Oh, and the present -giving from the cats has stopped now, thank goodness. I did have some trouble with the cat from next door constantly coming inside my house, but that stopped the day the toddler fell off the couch and he broke her fall. He hasn't been back.**

**See it's all go here!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I was rapidly trying to throw cans of tomato soup and chicken thighs into the slow cooker when Pam stomped in. "We're supposed to be going_ now_" she said, grumpily.

"Yeah, I know" I said. "But I just need to…get this in here…and add, some…oh, that'll do." I chucked some oregano in with the garlic I was adding.

"Aaargh!" Pam huffed, and then she left the kitchen, only to be replaced by Eric a minute later.

"So, are you ready? We need to get going before the kids break something in the hallway." He sounded grumpy too, and I didn't think it was just the threat of knocked over furniture that was really worrying him. For one thing, he didn't even turn his head at Felicia shouting "Sam! I am gonna push you right through this wall if you don't move away!" Because I, for one, wasn't that sure that was just an idle threat on Felicia's part. I'd seen her in action.

But no, Eric, like Pam was keyed up because this was Pam's big day. Her first day at school. But they were keyed up for different reasons. Pam was excited beyond belief and had spent part of the morning fretting about how her uniform looked and kept following Felicia and Amelia around asking their opinion. Felicia dodged her and Amelia tried, and failed, to feign an interest. They'd long lost any interest they might have had when they owned that particular skirt. But Pam was undeterred and had tracked me down instead.

I'd told her it looked lovely and that it really didn't matter that the skirt was slightly too big for her.

But the loveliness of her new uniform aside, she was anxious to get to school and to get settled into her class and reconnect with a Bella who was already there. Bella M. Maybe Bella O. I kind of lost track of them all, but at any rate, Pam was busting to get out the door and hit the road.

Eric was just miserable, and there wasn't anything I could do about that. My plan was hunker down and wait until he got used to the way the world was now. Or take an extended holiday with Jason. Either way, I didn't want to be around when Eric was looking for someone to take the brunt of his frustration.

"I am…just…ready…now!" I said, rapidly rinsing the empty tins and putting them beside the sink, ready to go in the recycling bin later on.

Eric huffed, and sighed, but didn't grumble too much. He just walked out of the kitchen leaving me to follow after him as fast as I could.

We dropped Felicia and Amelia at the Mt Eden village so they could walk the rest of the way to their schools. But they weren't quick enough for Eric, and he yelled about how he was on a yellow line and could they please get out of the car now before he got a ticket. "Yeah, chill Dad" Felicia said, risking life and limb as she climbed out the door. "Later, dudes."

"Wish Pam good luck" I said to her.

"Yeah, luck Pom-pom" Felicia said, and then she was gone.

"She thinks she's sooo funny" Amelia grumbled. "But she's not, she's just, like, really stupid. Why does she say dudes all the time? It's so stupid!"

"Yellow line Amelia!" Eric called from the front seat.

Amelia turned and glared at Eric. "Just, um…so have fun and remember that if the other girls say they won't play with you…"

"Why won't they play with me?" Pam asked tremulously.

"Oh…um…" Amelia thought for a moment. "You'll be OK. Just, um, remember to be everyone's friend…OK? And scrunch your socks down." She climbed out the door too.

"See you, Amelia" I called, but I didn't get a response.

"That took long enough" Eric grumbled, as he switched on the indicator.

"Mum, why did Amelia say that?" Pam asked. "Because Bella will play with me, won't she?"

"I'm sure she will" I said, hoping that would be it.

It was. "She will" Pam said, confidently. "She likes me."

On the drive to the primary school Eric's mood infected everyone and the boys were being unusually silent. Pam was buzzing though. "Do you think I'll get to choose my desk, or will I have to sit where Ms Sullivan puts me?"

"Um…I don't know" I said. I tried to remember what had happened previously, but it had depended on who the teacher was, I thought. Since Mrs Garfield's retirement there'd been quite the turnover of new entrants' teachers, the last one having left when Tray was in her class.

I wasn't even going to try to connect that one.

"Now there is no fucking parking here" Eric muttered, as we pulled up outside the school. Well there was, of course, but the trouble was that my car needed an enormous parking space and there weren't many of those.

"There's one" Sam said, pointing, and then he obviously thought better of trying to direct Eric, because he pulled his hand back quickly.

"Mmm" Eric said, as he pulled into a side-street, executed a rather clumsy three-point turn, while muttering under his breath, and then pulled back onto the street…only to find the parking place had been taken by a vehicle half our size.

The four of us who weren't Eric, stayed very, very still and quiet and waited for what would happen next. Eric sighed, and drove on, meaning we had to wait at the school crossing again after they put the signs out to let a bunch of kids and parents cross. "Look!" Pam called. "There's Bella O!"

"She can't hear you" Sam pointed out. "So stop yelling."

"Oh…go eat poo!" Pam said to him. She wasn't having anyone rain on her parade today. Not even Eric who was double-parked, waiting for someone to leave their spot so we could have it. Problem was that our double parking had stopped the poor woman seeing any oncoming traffic and she was understandably a bit nervous about pulling straight out, despite the amount of gesturing Eric was doing to tell her it was fine and to just bloody drive off.

Luckily, she couldn't hear the soundtrack to the gestures.

When we were finally parked, Tray had his seatbelt off and was at the sliding door of the people mover before Eric even had the handbrake on fully. He was really keen to get away from us all.

"Hold on, Tray" Eric said. "The rest of us need to get out too."

Yeah, Tray did not look like he was thrilled with this being a family outing. Tray had a busy schedule of punching, tripping and putting other little boys in headlocks to get to and he didn't want his lame family holding him back. I always got the feeling that Tray worried that if he missed out on the daily re-confirmation of the pecking order in his group, something bad would happen. I hadn't yet figured out what that would be, but it seemed to keep Tray motivated to go to school, so I wasn't too worried about it.

Tray sighed, and stopped trying to open the door. Even he knew when to admit defeat about these things.

As we walked into the school, Pam held Eric's hand and skipped along chatting to him. Eric didn't really respond. Tray tried tripping Sam up, but I sensed that it wasn't the same as tripping his friends up.

"Um…we'll just go now" Sam said, as we got near the classrooms. I think he was worried we might try and escort him to his class. He hadn't wanted that for a very long time now.

"OK" I said, cheerfully. Well, one of us had to be.

"Cool" Tray said. "Bye!" And then he ran off.

"Um…" Sam said, looking at Pam. "Just, um…do you want me to come and find you?"

"Find me?" Pam asked. "When?"

"Lunchtime" Sam said.

"I can open my own lunchbox" Pam said. "It's got princesses on it, like my backpack."

"Oh…no…um…" Sam tried rephrasing it, but Pam butted in. "You can't eat my lunch!" she said. "Daddy! Tell him he can't eat my lunch. It's _my _lunch."

"Don't eat her lunch" Eric said, but his heart wasn't really in it. He was staring at the block of classrooms as though he was trying to will them to just disappear.

"I think he knows that one" I pointed out.

Sam sighed. "Yeah…just. 'Cos it's your first day. I could come and find you…if you want?"

"Oh" Pam said. "But…Bella's here…"

Sam shrugged. "I'll, um. I'll just be over there then." He pointed to a corner of the playing fields that ran alongside the playground.

"Yeah. OK" Pam said, sounding unconcerned. I guess it was hard to appreciate a reasonably good big brother if you were used to him. I couldn't remember Jason ever making the same offer to me.

"Bye then" Sam said, and he started to walk off.

"Bye" I said.

"Tell Tray he can't eat my lunch either!" Pam called out.

Sam didn't reply to that, but kind of waved over his shoulder at us.

"I think Tray's going to want my lunch" Pam murmured.

She did have a point. "Well…just tell him he can't have it. Regardless of whether he ate all his food at morning tea or not." Tray didn't have a lot of restraint when it came to what was in his lunchbox, and his view was that if it was there, it was there to be eaten at the first opportunity. Sadly, he tended to pay for that view later in the day and Sam often ended up feeding him. I'd just taken to packing Sam's lunchbox full of extra food hoping it would get to Tray in the end.

"It's _my_ lunchbox. And it has princesses" Pam said again. Hopefully, the princesses would keep Tray away. These days he mostly seemed to be allergic to anything pink and sparkly. "Can we go in now? I want to see my desk." Pam addressed that to Eric and he looked at her like she'd grown another head.

"Um…" Eric seemed to be thinking about that one. I didn't really think we had a choice about it at this point in the proceedings. Eventually the truancy officers would catch up with us, and if any home-schooling was in the works, well, that could be on Eric's watch.

My watch was almost over.

"Come on!" I said. "Let's go!"

EPOV

It just felt fucking wrong taking Pam to school. She was far too small. I looked around the playground and some of those kids were fucking huge. Who knew what might happen to her at lunchtime?

Although…fuck. I should have told Sam to watch out for her. That might have helped. Hopefully Pam would be able to find him if she needed him…but, fuck it; there were a lot of kids here.

Were there always this many kids here?

"I get my own cubby hole" Pam was saying as we walked to the classroom. "Not just any one, but the same special one every day. So it's not like preschool. I hope my cubby hole is next to someone nice."

"I'm sure it will be" Sookie's voice said behind me. I wasn't quite sure why she was so happy about this whole thing. It seemed a bit cruel to Pam. We were supposed to be looking after her, not throwing her out the door to flounder in a sea of kids who acted like fucking animals. The boys over in the corner of the playground looked like they were engaged in an all-out fucking war. I didn't know why the teachers weren't fucking doing something about it before someone got hurt.

"I'm going to pretend I just didn't see Tray" Sookie said. Tray wasn't really my concern at this point, and I certainly hadn't seen him. I was worried about Pam. She'd always been a tough little thing, but that didn't mean that nothing could happen to her. Possibly she was just putting on a brave face. I was pretty sure Sookie was too, because she kept sounding way too fucking cheerful for it to be normal.

I was probably the only one who was actually dealing with this OK.

"So, um, you're OK?" I asked Pam, as we reached the door of her classroom.

"Look!" she squealed. "That's my name, on the cubbyhole. It's got a sticker like everyone else's does. But they wrote Pamela, do you think I can get Ms Sullivan to change it? Do you? Or maybe…I guess Pamela doesn't rhyme with Sam does it? So it might be better."

"Well, if you don't like it" I said. "I could talk to the teacher."

I looked down at Pam and she looked horrified at that thought. "Oh no" she said. "No, it's OK. I mean…I can be Pamela. Pamela's good."

"Pamela's lovely" Sookie said.

Pam put her bag on the floor and pulled out her new pencil case and a notebook. "I'm going to change my name on my book" she said. "So that it says Pamela too, and not Pam."

"Well do that when you get to your desk" Sookie advised. "Do you want us to walk you in?"

"Oh" Pam said, looking at the other kids walking into the classroom. "Um…no other parents are going in?"

"Yeah, but I think you're the only one who's having their first day here" Sookie said, looking around. "I think they've all been here for a while."

"Oh" Pam said again, and she looked a little less confident. I gave Sookie a dirty look, which she blatantly ignored, and crouched down to talk to Pam. "Hey" I said. "You'll be fine."

"Yeah" she said, but she didn't sound all that fine.

"You'll be great" I said. "And you'll have fun."

"With Bella?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Maybe with other kids too."

"They'll like me?"

"They will. I like you" I said to her.

"I like you too, Daddy!" Pam said, and she gave me a big hug. Then she turned and hugged Sookie's legs. "Bye, Mum" she said. "Bye Daddy. I'm going to go in now and see my desk." She started to walk into the classroom. "That's OK, isn't it?" she asked. "It's OK to go in?"

"Yeah" I said. "It is. And you can tell me about your desk tonight."

"OK. Cool" Pam said, and she was gone before Sookie and I could say goodbye to her. I stood up, and Sookie put her arm around my waist. "She'll be OK" Sookie mused.

"She will" I agreed. Sookie clearly needed cheering up a bit. "She'll probably be great."

"She'll probably be in charge by lunchtime" Sookie said.

"She'll probably be selling her lunch to Tray" I added. Pam wasn't above seeing her brothers as potential sources of getting what she wanted.

"I made her pink coconut ice" Sookie said. "She loves that." Sookie didn't say anything for a moment. "Right" she said, gathering herself together. "On to work and let Judith go and rescue Will from Lorena, who was, apparently, muttering because Will has a cold and she doesn't want to catch it herself."

"Um…" I was still a bit worried about Sookie, and worried that she wasn't really, well, dealing with the whole Pam going to school thing. She was our last kid after all. This was it; it was the end of the baby years.

I really thought that Sookie needed time to fully process the change before she was off dealing with a bunch of other people's toddlers.

"You know" I said. "We could have coffee somewhere before you go?"

"Um…oh. Um, OK" Sookie said, not sounding sure about it. Yeah, she was definitely covering up the feelings she had. Probably her plan had been to go home and cry in the bathroom. Because it was sad…kind of sad, anyway. Even I could see that. And it had to be worse for Sookie. So I'd take her out and cheer her up and that'd make it better for her. It worked for me when I was feeling a bit…well, when I was down. Spending time with Sookie always helped me, so it was bound to help her too.

It was just lucky I was doing OK with all of this.

SPOV

I could see Eric looked kind of bereft when Pam finally went into the classroom. He just crouched there, watching her go. And then he just stood there, watching the door. Probably waiting for her to come back out and announced she'd changed her mind and would start next year.

Because how could school ever compare to Daddy, anyway?

So when Eric suggested we go for coffee, I thought why not? He needed the cheering up after all, and I was sure that Judith and India could cope for a bit longer. Well, I was sure that I could put up with the resultant moaning from Judith anyway.

Eric drove us to the café attached to Bowman's restaurant which was a little way away from the village and further down towards where we used to live in Merton Street. We got parking right outside, which was nice after this morning's adventures in the car, and went inside. The café was decorated like someone's living room, so I sat on a couch tucked into a corner of the room while Eric ordered coffee, and when he joined me a few moments later, he sat in the armchair opposite.

"So that's it then" I said. "All of them at school." I realised as the look of horror crossed Eric's face that it had probably been the wrong thing to say.

"Yeah" he said. "It doesn't seem like five years since she was a baby."

"No" I agreed. "Although…I don't know. I'm a bit hazy about Pam being really little. I think maybe I was kind of busy during that time."

"Everything was fucking busy" Eric agreed. "The boys didn't sit still for five fucking minutes."

"No. But they're not much better now. Only now there seem to be shovels involved in what they're doing."

"They're filling the hole in now, Sookie." The waitress brought our coffees over and Eric nodded to her, and I said "Thanks."

"Yeah, but I still don't really see the attraction of digging a hole in the first place. At least when they were small I kind of got the games."

"Really, Sookie?" Eric asked, taking a sip of his coffee and considering it. I guess it passed the Eric Northman test because he took another sip straight afterwards. "You understood the game that involved leaping off the couch and trying to tackle whoever walked past."

"I understood it" I said. "I didn't say I liked it. Or thought we should be encouraging it." Eric hadn't been particularly worried about the superhero phase the boys went through, and their continual conviction that they could fly if they needed to.

Eric shrugged. "They needed something to do"

"It was exhausting trying to keep up with them and all the things they 'needed to do'" I said, drinking some of my own coffee. "I used to long for you to come home and the daddy-rides to start."

"Ha. Yeah" Eric said, smiling.

"You were the cheapest entertainment ever" I said to him.

"Thanks very much!" Eric said, trying to look affronted.

"Well, you know. Daddy comes home and all of a sudden they have a playmate and jungle gym all in one. Remember Felicia's constant demands to throw her?"

"Yeah, I do" Eric said, a bit wistfully.

"I don't think she ever really got over the novelty that one day you just showed up. I mean, clearly I sucked due to the distinct lack of throwing that had taken place up to that point."

"You have, uh…other skills" Eric said, looking at me very seriously. I stuck my tongue out at him. "Yeah, thanks mate" I said. "That's good to know."

"Well…you used to get all of Amelia's stories" Eric said, frowning like he was trying to remember back that far.

"I know! And they would go on and on and sometimes be serialised so you'd get it told to you in chunks over successive days. In a way, making dinner just isn't the same these days without the constant tales of dragons and princesses. I know she's been a bit better this last week or so…but I do kind of miss her. A lot."

"She'll be OK. I think now we've seen the…well, it's pretty clear it's just Amelia trying to find a way through. She'll be OK, and she'll be back to normal before we know it. Look how quickly Pam's taken to get to five." There was silence again as we thought about that.

"She took so long to get any hair" I said. "Well, hair you could see. At least she has hair for school. And Amelia put it in a plait for her this morning." I sipped my coffee. "You know, braid" I translated for Eric's benefit; he still sometimes got confused when I used a term he wasn't used to. Luckily I was pretty fluent in American. "Amelia's had a lot of practice; she came out with a full head of hair."

"I've only seen the photos" Eric said.

"Yeah…when I went in for my six week check-up, Russell said it looked like I'd stuck her hand in a power socket" I said, and Eric barked out another laugh. "He's not always that tactful" I said.

"Nope" Eric agreed. "I just…well I never imagined having to tell a doctor what birth control we'd be using. Until, you know, we had kids."

"Yeah. You should try being a woman. You spend your life telling doctors all the intimate details of your life. And of course every time I did go back to see Russell I'd have to tell him whether we'd had sex…"

"What?" Eric asked.

"Yeah…although, to be honest, he probably guessed when I got myself knocked up six months after I had a baby."

"Mmm" Eric said.

"But I'm pretty sure he thought it was all your fault" I added, smiling at Eric over my cup.

"I'm not the one having the contraception talks, Sookie. I doubt he really blamed me" Eric said.

"Yeah, you stick to that" I advised him.

"I will" Eric said, grinning at me. Then he stopped and looked more thoughtful. "It wasn't so bad, was it? Having him…then? Right after Sam?"

"Um…no, although it was hard work. And I did feel kind of bad about Sam for a while, you know, missing out on having me to himself."

Eric shrugged. "He got a brother though."

"And if he didn't have Tray, you'd have to be out there digging holes with him."

"Exactly."

"He was a cute baby though. Sam. Everyone used to comment when we went out. It drove Felicia bonkers because we heard it so often. She took to introducing him as 'my baby Sam who is cute like Daddy'."

"Really?" Eric asked. "Huh."

"Yeah…well I talked her out of saying 'has a willy like Daddy'." Eric just about spat the last mouthful of coffee out. "OK" he said.

"She was fascinated by that" I said. "Every nappy change she'd want to be there, for a while, anyway. By Tray though the novelty had totally worn off and she didn't really ever notice him in the same way. She's never wanted to beat him up as much, either. She still thinks that Sam deserves to be punished just for existing."

"Oh, I don't know that it's _that_ bad, Sookie. I think it's more…well, she likes him."

"She has a funny way of showing it" I grumbled.

Eric shrugged. "If she didn't care, she'd just ignore him. She's pretty good at ignoring things she can't be bothered with."

"That is one of Felicia's strong suits" I agreed. Maybe Eric was right and it was a kind of misplaced affection.

Although I wasn't sure how Sam would feel about being on the receiving end of Felicia's love. I, for one, had never felt particularly cherished by the fact Jason wanted to wrestle me to the ground and steal all my toys.

"Luckily Sam can take it, really" I said. "And it doesn't get nastier."

"No" Eric agreed. "He's more worried about what Tray's up to."

"Tray just annoys everyone" I said. "He can't stay out of anyone else's business sometimes."

Eric shrugged. "He just wants to be involved. He likes…well, he likes to be needed."

"Maybe you're right" I agreed. "Although I'm not sure anyone ever needs to be constantly poked in the leg by someone else's foot." I sighed. "At least when they were babies they didn't fight. They were all so cute…remember when Sam used to get all sleepy? And he'd deny he was sleepy, but he'd just get really cuddly and all he'd want to do is put his head on my lap?"

"Yeah" Eric said. "He was very cuddly. With you, anyway."

"I guess…I think he cuddled you too."

"He did, but only if there wasn't a choice."

"I think that might have been due to the fact he liked to put his hand down my top and stroke my bra" I said. "You don't wear one."

"He liked your hair too" Eric pointed out. "He'd stroke that sometimes."

"He did. But he seemed quite attached to the bras and you just couldn't compete. So it was lucky you got Pam" I said. "She never wanted anyone but you…remember the whole 'mummy' thing, where she wouldn't say daddy? She was so adamant you were mummy. And I just wouldn't do as a replacement."

"She was little" Eric said. "So very little."

"But I don't think she was confused. I think…well, I think it was a deliberate decision. She loved you to pieces. All that time she used to sit there and chat to you when you worked, even if it was just baby-chatter, she had stuff she wanted you to know."

"She used to make me drink endless cups of pretend tea" Eric said. "And she had that little pink teapot that used to play fucking annoying little songs. The singer had a terrible English accent too. It was horrific."

"But she loved it" I said.

"She did" Eric agreed.

"And she loves you."

"You too."

"She's so big now" I said. "When did she get to be so big? I just…she was a baby, and now she's a school girl and I'm no longer the mother of any pre-schoolers, even, let alone toddlers or babies. Fourteen years I've been doing this now. Fourteen years and I've finally got them all to this stage. It was exhausting!"

"Yeah…it was. But it was good too, I wouldn't have not done it" Eric said.

"No" I agreed. "Me either. And I feel like we did a good job."

"We did" Eric said.

"So Pam'll be OK. At school. And we can…now we can concentrate on the next stage. I mean…Felicia'll be a teenager next. Ugh."

Eric sighed and looked at the coffeetable between us, and then he looked up at me. He looked me straight in the eyes and said "So, there's something I want to say…" and I panicked thinking that he couldn't possibly do this to me again, couldn't ask me for another baby, couldn't suggest that we start again when I was nearly 45 and we finally had all five children in school and I was getting a whole day to myself on Friday. I had things to do. I had a list. I had plans. And my plans did not include more visits to Russell to explain that I'd been knocked up. Again.

"I think…" Eric said, shifting his gaze away from me to the couch I was sitting on. "I think I should get a vasectomy. I really do." He looked back at me and I let out the breath I'd been holding. That wasn't what I'd expected. We'd discussed it before, but I'd shut him down. It hadn't seemed right to take away his fertility when he was so young and who knew what the future held?

But when I looked at Eric, and really looked at him, he didn't actually look that young. I mean, he looked great, he always did, and he looked like Eric. But he also looked a bit tired, and a bit worried, and a lot like the dad of five kids who'd had to send his youngest off to school that morning and who was feeling the strain of it.

For the first time I felt that I might know what the future held. The future held Pam as a teenager and if Pam as a toddler had been hard work then Pam as a teenager might be even worse.

I was glad I had Eric. Glad we'd be in that together. And more than glad to say we were done. No more babies. We had our family now, and they were all currently somewhere else hopefully learning something, but, at the very least, being entertained by someone other than us.

"Yeah" I said. "I think that's a good idea."

"You do?" Eric asked. "But you were so against it…and you know, kept saying that I should wait. And I just thought, after everything that happened with Pam…I couldn't take that risk, I really couldn't…"

"It's OK" I said. "We don't have to. This is it. Let's just try to get through the next fourteen years without anything too bad happening to the ones we have. And if Pam stays the youngest, then we can totally move out of home when she hits puberty. We can probably move in with Amelia. She owes us!"

Eric laughed, and then he stood up and held out his hand to help me up. "Plus, I'm an old lady now" I said. "Try pulling me up when I'm pregnant."

Eric pulled me to him for a kiss, and it was lovely because we didn't have anyone there to make 'euw' noises or point out they were dying of embarrassment because this was a public place and we were too old for this nonsense.

"I love you" I said.

"I love you too" Eric said back to me, and then we turned and walked to the car, Well, there was a detour on the way out the door because the barista had put a tip jar on the counter and Eric felt compelled to put something in it. "They're just trying it on" I said to him. "No one here tips!" But he ignored me. Some things never change.

EPOV

I thought I'd done a pretty good job of cheering Sookie up. It had been a while since it had just been us and it was good to talk, even if we were mostly talking about the kids, and what they'd been like when they'd been little.

Those years were great, and I wouldn't trade them for the fucking world.

But I think Sookie and I agreed now, that we couldn't go back. That this was it, we were done, and it was all about the future.

And probably my future included a long and lengthy discussion with Pam about her new desk. But that was OK, because that stage didn't last long either.

**Thanks for reading!**


	17. Chapter 17

**A/N. Yep, still here, still busy. Tomorrow I have a christening in the morning and a wedding in the evening. I know! Why wouldn't you schedule those for the week before Christmas? Also the forecast says thunderstorms. Awesome, just awesome.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but in punishment for what I have to go through, I'm making them go to a wedding next. **

SPOV

My to-do list had been growing by the day and by the time Friday came around it had quite a number of items on it. I waved Sam, Tray and Pam off on the walking bus and turned a blind eye to the fact that Tray was trying to trip Pam and Sam was trying to pull him back. They weren't my problem once they crossed the threshold of the gate.

It was my story, and I was sticking to it.

I walked back into the kitchen and had a moment of total dithering. The list was long and I was tempted to do so many things on it. I wanted to have a sneaky comb through Eric's office while he wasn't around and tidy a few things. Actually I wanted to do that to everyone's bedrooms, too. I could pull out all their old clothes and toys and get rid of them.

Or I could tidy the pantry and get rid of expired food. That was always quite enjoyable and satisfying. Although, the whole kitchen needed a good going-over. I was sure there was stuff lurking in drawers that needed to be weeded out and re-organised. I wasn't quite sure I was up to all of that today.

The freezer needed a decent defrost as well. And it would mean a throw-together buffet dinner of all the things that needed using up. That could be fun.

But I looked out the window and decided. Bedding. Today's plan was change the sheets and wash those, plus take off the duvet covers, wash all of those, and change the duvet inners for winter ones. Then next week I'd take the summer inners to the drycleaner's. I would have liked to wash them all myself and save money, but seven was too many to get dry, and they'd be hanging around for ages waiting for me to have time, space in the washing machine, and enough fine weather.

And if they weren't on the bed, then it was pretty obvious that duvet inners belonged in the roof.

So that was my first stop, I pulled the trapdoor with the attached ladder down from the ceiling of the laundry and climbed up and looked around, wondering where Eric had put the winter duvets. They were packed into those big plastic zip-up bags you could buy to keep the dust out and they should be around here somewhere.

They'd be behind the Christmas decorations I figured, because Eric was a master of the 'open door and shove' method of putting things away, so the stuff that went in last spring, would be behind the stuff that went in during summer.

And sure enough, they were. I felt kind of pleased I'd worked that out so quickly. OK, it wasn't the biggest mystery in the world, but, well, it still felt good to have sorted it out.

I was kind of awesome.

Plus, having not been up there swearing and yelling and blaming the roof for hiding everything from me, I dropped the bags with the duvet inners through the trapdoor onto the laundry floor, causing Eddie, who must have to come investigate what I was doing, to run away in terror, and was back in the laundry myself in record time, ready to go and strip beds.

Yep, pretty damn awesome.

Half an hour later I was back in the laundry and had put the first load of washing on. I checked the weather out the window, but it seemed to be holding. Great. This was going to be a good day.

I briefly considered a celebratory cup of tea, but thought that maybe while the washing was on I'd have time to clean out the drawer with the kitchen utensils. It kept jamming on the balloon whisk and I suspected it was full of crumbs. That'd be the way to do the kitchen, I thought, if I just did one drawer or cupboard every week, then it would be easy.

I was just congratulating myself on having such a brilliant plan about the kitchen when I heard the front door open, which was weird, because the kids were all in school. Then the large fly in my personal ointment called out "It's me."

Well that was…something. An unexpected something, because Eric had left before everyone else that morning and hadn't said anything about coming back. Ivan, who'd been sitting in front of the bifold doors to the deck when I last saw him, must have perked up at the sound of his master's voice, and I could hear him making his way down the hall, his collar jangling and his nails clicking on the wooden floor.

"Where are you?" Eric called out, and I figured it wasn't Ivan he was missing and he probably knew where the kids were too. Hiding in the linen cupboard was out because Bella had already bagged that spot and wasn't keen on sharing, with me anyway. Bugger.

I stepped into the kitchen. "In here" I called out just as Eric stuck his head through the door. He gave me a big grin and came over to kiss me. "How come you're home?" I asked, as he pulled back. I hoped I didn't sound whiny and annoyed. Well, not too whiny and annoyed anyway.

I had a list. A big, long, detailed list of things to do. Things I wanted to do when the house was peaceful and I had it all to myself. And 'entertain husband' wasn't top of that list. It wasn't even on the damn list.

Eric shrugged. "I went to the breakfast and had the meeting and it was the same as fucking usual, and then I thought about going back to the office, but I thought fuck it. Fridays are boring. And we've got the place to ourselves!" He gave me another big grin while I mentally corrected his statement. I had the place to myself. Myself! I never got the place to myself.

Was it too much to ask for one day?

"Yeah…" I said slowly.

"We could have lunch. Or something?" Eric said, giving me a look when he said the 'or something'.

"The bed isn't made" I blurted out.

"What?"

I sighed. "I meant that…well; I'm in the middle of something. Changing all the bedding. Washing sheets and duvet covers, and changing the duvet inners over for the winter ones."

"So…we're getting them from the roof space?" Eric said, his eyes drifting upwards.

"Oh, I already did that" I said, and Eric visibly relaxed. Yeah, bugger. Should have told him it was on his list and he might have been less enthusiastic about hanging out with me.

"Well we can hang out here" Eric said. "It's peaceful without the kids."

"Yeah" I agreed. "It is." At least I didn't say 'it was'.

Eric still picked up on my reluctance though. "But you wanted to be by yourself?" he asked me, and I felt really mean. He just wanted to hang out with me, after all. It was like when Eddie came and sat on my feet at night, only with less purring.

"No" I said. "It's just…I wanted to get some stuff done. Around the house. And I kind of started while you weren't here."

"Oh, well that's OK" Eric said. "I'll help. First up, I'll make you a cup of coffee. After I get out of this fucking suit." He kissed me on the cheek and walked off, Ivan following along behind him. I sighed, and walked back to the laundry to check on the progress of the washing.

Eric reappeared a little while later as I was in full swing with the utensil drawer. There really was a lot of crap in there. Some of my kitchen tongs were terribly rusty, and the handle kept falling off one of the spatulas, so they could all go. Along with the barbecue lighter that didn't light anymore, the rubber bands so old they just snapped, and the lone sweet corn handle that didn't have a mate anymore.

I looked at Eric and he was looking a little ragged round the edges too. That t-shirt was really old. Really old. I think he'd had that longer than we'd been together. I certainly doubted anywhere around here sold t-shirts with the names of American colleges on them. And the trackpants, well I'd say the fact he'd managed to put his knee through one leg of them might make me doubt their durability, but they'd had a pretty hard life too and were still around.

This was odd; because I was pretty sure they'd been binned in the great wardrobe clean-up the previous year. It was funny how that kept happening.

But although Eric might look as tatty as the plastic spoon with the melted edges that was in my 'to throw out' pile, I didn't think there was any point trying to get rid of him. He'd already proven himself pretty difficult to get rid of that morning.

At least he was making me coffee.

Trouble was that I totally forgot I'd just been shoving groceries in the pantry the night before because it was full, and that was the reason that I'd thought seriously about tackling it as today's project. And because I had only been putting stuff in temporary locations, I hadn't really thought about where things would be most accessible.

Or best hidden.

"Sookie" Eric said when he went in there to get out a new packet of coffee. "What the fuck is this?" He walked out holding my dirty little secret in his hands, as though it might explode at any moment.

"Um…coffee" I said.

"No it's fucking not" Eric said, looking at it with utter distaste. "It's…it's…"

"It's instant cappuccinos, Eric. You just mix the powder with water. Judith put me onto them at work." I looked at the ground, and felt ridiculously guilty. Like I'd actually been cheating on Eric or something. Instead I'd just been cheating on his coffee. Something he felt bound to remind me of.

"But I make you coffee, Sookie" Eric said. "With the machine, not with…powder…so it's instant?"

"Yeah" I said, "Which is great for work, because we're in all those halls and they don't have coffee machines and we can't go out and buy coffee, they charge too much for one thing, so they're great. For then. For when you're not around."

Eric sighed. "What else do you replace me with when I'm not around?"

"Nothing! Well, sometimes I get Sam to make me a cup of tea…"

"You do?"

"Yeah, he seems to quite like doing it."

"Huh" Eric said. "I didn't realise I was quite so fucking replaceable."

"You're not" I said, going over to him and putting my arms around his waist. "There's only one you."

"But apparently you don't need me to make coffee anymore?"

"I think you might be blowing this out of proportion…" I said to Eric.

He sighed. "So do you still want actual coffee, or this shit?"

"Well, coffee. You did promise me."

"Fine" Eric said, and he shoved the box with the cappuccino packets into my hand and walked over to the coffeemaker and started…doing things with it. Honestly that thing was so incredibly complicated I wouldn't even know where to start with getting it to work. But I could boil water.

I shut the now tidy utensil drawer and heard the washing machine beep. "Oh, better go and hang the first load out" I said.

"But the coffee's nearly ready" Eric said.

"Yeah…well that's OK. I'll get mine when I come back. But I want to make the most of the sun, and get the second load going."

Eric sighed, and the coffee machine clanked and I walked into the laundry.

EPOV

I'd thought that it would be a nice surprise coming home to spend the day with Sookie. We had a whole day to ourselves, at least until the kids came home from school. We could go out for lunch, without having to arrange babysitters. I had a memory that once upon a time, when Felicia was small and took naps and Amelia had been at preschool, there'd been lunches out. And then sex. I definitely remembered the sex. But so far, well I got the fucking impression that I was a bit surplus to requirements.

Plus I found out she'd been drinking fucking instant cappuccinos. For some reason, that fucking hurt.

And now she didn't even want to sit down and have coffee with me because she had some big fucking project on that involved wet fucking laundry.

This wasn't as much fun as I thought it was going to be.

I made the coffee, but left the cups on the counter as I walked through the laundry and out the door to the deck. Sookie had already started to put the laundry on the line, and she was struggling to hold all the fabric of our quilt cover in her hands without some of it trailing on the ground and making the whole washing process kind of redundant.

"Hang on" I said. "Wait for me." As I said the words I realised they sounded a bit shitty, but fuck, I was here, could she not just fucking ask for my help?

"I thought you were having coffee" Sookie said, as I took one end of the large, wet cover out of her hands.

"I was having coffee with you. You weren't there."

"Yeah, I need to get this done. Hold it lower." Yeah, if it hadn't been for the yards of fabric between us I might have noticed that Sookie's arms were above her head, but fuck, that was better than doing this herself. Surely?

I wasn't so fucking sure. She seemed kind of grumpy.

When everything was on the line, and Sookie had fussed about whether there would be space for the next load, or whether she'd need to bring the portable line outside, we finally got to go back inside. To our lukewarm coffee.

I had thought that maybe we were getting to the good stuff, that Sookie would sit down with me and we could talk.

But no, Sookie had fucking other plans again. In between hurried sips of her coffee she was gathering up old fucking kitchen equipment in plastic bags, wiping down all the surfaces in the kitchen, pulling the quilts out of their bags and checking them, and pulling things out of the freezer for dinner that night.

"What are we having?" I asked, as I rinsed my cup.

"Oh…dunno. Something with mince anyway" she said, putting the packets on the kitchen counter. "I'll decide this afternoon."

I had hoped that one benefit to Sookie being home alone in the day might be the type of meal we got. Not that I expected five star dining, for one thing, the kids could be fucking fussy. But I had thought that maybe we might get something that needed to be cooked for longer. Like roast lamb. And Yorkshire puddings.

I wasn't so fucking stupid as to say that to Sookie. But I did sigh. And that was the wrong fucking thing to do.

"I know it's only mince, Eric" Sookie said, kind of snippily. "But there are a lot of people who need feeding in this house and it's expensive. Have you seen how much Tray eats these days?"

I shrugged. I got the feeling nothing I said would be welcomed about now. Fuck, this was not how I thought the day was going to go.

SPOV

Eric was proving to be both useful and a pain in the bum. Well the useful part had only lasted about ten minutes; the pain in the bum part seemed to be dragging on. I'd thought I'd have absolute carte blanche to do what I wanted, but I hadn't expected everything, like my choices for dinner, to be quite so scrutinised. Even the kids weren't that bad. Normally by this time on a Friday Pam would trying to get me to bake, get out the playdough, or take her out to a café. She wasn't standing around sighing because it was mince for dinner. Again.

But it was all part of the master plan to run the freezer down so I could defrost it, so he'd have to live with it.

We put the next load of washing outside and it was definitely easier with that second pair of hands around. Even if the hands in question kept holding all the sheets and duvet covers six feet in the bloody air and making it hard to me to manage the other end. Ivan enjoyed that part though, he came out to watch. And bark at the sheets as they slowly flapped in the breeze.

We walked back inside and Eric clapped his hands together. "Lunch?" he asked. Bugger. He wasn't going to like this one either.

"Well…" I said. "I was kind of thinking of making myself tuna salad…" Normally I ended up eating whatever the kids wanted, and what they left. If I'd had Pam here, it might have been banana and jam sandwiches and apple slices again, and Pam would probably have expected me to serve it on her little pink polka-dot china tea-set which came in its own picnic basket. But tuna salad sounded much better than that.

Not to Eric though. "Oh" he said. "Um…salad?"

"With tuna."

"Mmm" Eric said, and he adopted that far-off look he got when he really wanted to tell me my idea was a crappy one, but he was trying to think of a nice way to do it. "You know, if it's the two of us, we could have something else?" he suggested.

"What?" I asked. "I didn't plan anything else. I mean, you can have sandwiches if you want, but there's not much else."

"Well" Eric said, nodding towards the kitchen bench. "There's minced beef there. We could, uh, have nachos…or something…" he gave me a look that was, I think, supposed to convince me that his idea was brilliant.

It wasn't.

"Um…but that's dinner" I pointed out. "If I use it for our lunch, I have to think of something else to have tonight." Eric didn't say anything. I guess that didn't seem like a great hardship to him. "And I did kind of fancy tuna salad" I said.

"Oh" Eric said. "Oh, well. OK. I'll um…" He looked a bit lost and confused, and a lot like Eddie did when he forgot that you'd already fed him and he couldn't figure out why you kept walking past his bowl and just ignoring him. And then he thought of something. "I'll have the chicken. In sandwiches." He turned and headed towards the fridge. I hated to break his heart, but it had to be done.

"It's all gone" I said.

"Gone?" Eric asked, like I was speaking a foreign language.

"Yeah, um…well, I had to do everyone else's lunches with it…" We'd had roast chicken, well, actually, it was two chickens, on Wednesday night and the leftovers were well and truly picked over. Including the one drumstick that Sam and Tray had discovered lurking in the fridge and had nearly come to blows over.

"Oh" Eric said, realisation dawning that he was sometimes last in the food chain. "Oh…"

"You could look in the freezer?" I suggested. "If you don't want to have tuna salad. There might be something in there. And I need to clear it out anyway, if I'm going to defrost it next week."

"Um…OK" Eric said, and he walked into the laundry. As I made my salad and admired how pretty it looked with the big pieces of yellow capsicum and the bright red cherry tomatoes, I could hear Eric raking around in the freezer and muttering. Eventually he reappeared clutching a plastic container that had clearly seen better days. There was a hole in the corner of it for one thing.

"I found something" he said, holding up his prize.

"Yeah" I said. "Um…is that stew?"

"Yeah" Eric said, sounding pleased. "It was right at the bottom, so I thought it would be good to use it up. For you."

"I don't know if it'll be OK anymore" I said. "It looks like it was open in the freezer…" Eric rolled his eyes. "It'll be fine, Sookie. You worry too much. Sure, it probably needs eating up, which is why I'm doing that. For you. It's hardly going to fucking kill me."

It was probably right; Eric's constitution seemed to be cast-iron. I'd seen him eat enough questionable left-overs over the years to realise that one. So, fine. It was his call.

Eric fluffed around getting his lunch defrosted and re-heated and then finally sat down to join me at the kitchen table. "See?" he said, showing me the bowl of mush I had made at some point in the past, "Leftovers are great."

"Mmm" I said, eating another forkful of my salad. Yep, using brie with the tomato flavoured tuna had been a brilliant idea. The creaminess of the cheese really cut through the sharpness of the tuna.

I looked over at Eric. He didn't seem to be enjoying his lunch quite so much. "Is it a bit funny?" I asked him.

"No" Eric said, putting some more in his mouth. "No" he said again, decidedly less convincingly.

"It's probably past its best" I said.

"S'OK" Eric said, shrugging and looking from his plate to mine, and back again.

"Want some salad instead?" I asked.

"Well…" Eric said, considering it. "I guess I could have it as well…" Yeah, Eric didn't seem to think salad was a whole meal, no matter how much cheese and tuna you added to it.

"I think there are still some of the bread rolls leftover" I said. "The ones I used to make chicken rolls for the school lunches…" I got up to have a look. "There are" I confirmed.

"Oh. Well if there's bread…" Eric said, looking at me hopefully.

"I'll get you some salad."

EPOV

I realised that Sookie kind of scratched around and ate crap when she was at home, but I hadn't realised she was subsisting on salad. It's not really a fucking meal. It's just…salad.

But she wouldn't let me take her to lunch, and she didn't seem to want to deviate from her plan, so I thought I was doing well finding something in the freezer to heat up. She'd said I was helping her after all.

Yeah, that freezer really needed to be fucking cleared out. The stuff at the bottom wasn't edible any longer. It was shit. Bland, watery shit. Suddenly Sookie's salad didn't look too fucking bad. And there was bread. There wasn't any of the fucking chicken that might have been better in the bread, that doesn't last long around here. Only the thin fucking stews actually manage to make it as far as the freezer these days.

Those boys will eat fucking anything.

But the salad wasn't too bad when I tried it. "Is the tuna flavoured?" I asked Sookie.

"Yeah" she said. "It's the sundried tomato one."

"It's not bad." It wasn't bad. It was better than that fucking awful stew.

When lunch was over I had hoped that maybe we'd get to sit down and relax. Or have sex. Sex would be good.

It wasn't often we got the house to ourselves after all. No one else here. Sookie couldn't try to tell me I was being too fucking noisy or tell me we had to be quick, or decide that it wasn't fucking appropriate to have sex on the dryer.

As if she'd been reading my mind Sookie looked out the window after we'd cleared up lunch. "I might have to use the dryer" she said. "It's clouding over and it's going to be touch and go getting everything dry anyway."

"Oh. OK" I said. Well, that would be perfect. Empty house, dryer running. I knew I'd fucking come home for a reason.

Sookie went outside to 'check the washing' and 'turn some of the almost-dry stuff'. So I went to the laundry to wait for when she'd come back in and switch the dryer on. But she didn't. I could hear her though; she was having a conversation with someone else. Laughing with someone else.

Who the fuck was she talking to?

I went out and she was saying goodbye to some guy I didn't know as he walked down our driveway. "Who the fuck was that?" I asked.

"Meter reader" Sookie said. "He came to read the electricity meter."

"Oh. But, um, you know him?"

"Well, I've seen him before, Eric. He was just letting me know he was here so he didn't scare me. And I said thank God he came now and not after I'd put the dryer on."

"I don't think it would make that much of a difference."

"Mmm. I was only joking" Sookie said, patting one of the sheets and then looking up at the sky. "I don't know…" she mused.

"Well, he's been now" I said. "Might as well use the dryer."

"But…the sun's coming out a bit more. If I can get a couple of hours more out here then they won't need as long in the dryer. Plus, you know, the sun's good for getting the bugs out of stuff."

I sighed. Sookie was convinced that putting all the laundry in the sun killed off all the germs.

"Well, whatever you think" I said. "But if you're not moving this stuff now, do you want to have coffee?" I figured that if I got her to sit down at least, then I might have a chance of getting her to lie down. Or fucking sit on a dryer. At this point, I didn't care.

"No" Sookie said. "I've got to remake the beds with clean sheets and put away the laundry I did yesterday. You can help with that."

"Oh…but, um…OK." Maybe if we were putting sheets on beds she might be persuaded to lie on one of those beds with me?

Apparently not. Sookie took some sheets out of the cupboard in the laundry room. "OK" she said, "I'll do Sam and Tray's room, you do Pam's. Then we'll do the others." She handed me some sheets covered in pink flowers.

"OK" I said, and started to walk off.

"Um…" Sookie said. "Just remember she has a system."

"System for what?"

"For the bed. You know, how her stuff goes…you do know, don't you?"

I shrugged. I had a vague idea. But it was stuff on a bed, how important was it really? "Yeah, it'll be fine" I said to Sookie, who sighed as I walked off.

I made Pam's bed and threw everything back on the bed. She wouldn't really care where the toys were placed, surely?

Sookie was in Amelia's room when I found her. She seemed to be a lot quicker at this than I was. "Here" she said, pointing to some sheets on the floor. "You can do Felicia's bed next."

"OK."

"Did you get it all back? The pillows and toys?"

"Yeah" I said.

"Yeah, they're on the bed, or yeah, they're on the bed and in the right place."

"Um, probably the first one" I said. "But I don't think Pam's going to care."

Sookie snorted. "Uh-huh. Well I'm telling her who did it, I really am."

"Fine" I said, and went to tackle Felicia's bed. It wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact I had to kick what seemed to be most of her clothes out of the way to get to the bed. Why the fuck had we bothered putting a closet in her room anyway? When I'd made the bed, I scooped up all the clothes and piled them on top of the clean sheets. Fuck it. She could sort that out.

I had to hunt down Sookie again. This time she was putting clean sheets on our bed. This looked more promising, and I was suddenly glad we'd left this one to last. One of the kid's beds might have been a bit creepy, but, our bed was fucking fair game.

"You can tuck that side in" Sookie said, nodding to my side of the bed. I did as I was asked, and then helped put pillowcases on the pillows. And then I was about to move across the bed to grab Sookie, when she walked out of the room.

Where the fuck did she go?

I saw her out the glass in the door, and she was now bringing some of the quilt covers inside. This had to mean the dryer.

I walked into the laundry room just as Sookie carried the basket inside. "Right" she said. "I'm going to put these in the dryer to finish off and then we can get the duvets on the bed before too long. You can take that one into our room."

"What one?" I asked. I was waiting for the dryer to start up, that was my fucking plan.

"That basket there, with yesterday's clean washing. I'm going to sort that next. Just dump it on our bed and I'll come and fold it."

"Oh, um…you don't want some help here?" I asked, watching Sookie start feeding the laundry into the dryer.

"Nope" she said cheerfully. "It's just about all in there."

Well…fuck it. There was no hope for my plan to have sex on the dryer that was for sure. I carried the basket into our room as asked, and placed it on the bed. Then I tried to figure out what to do next. Today hadn't gone quite as I'd planned it.

SPOV

When I went into our room to fold washing I found Eric lounging on the bed, without his t-shirt. That was a marked improvement because that thing was manky, and I was kind of keen on finding out where he'd stashed it so I could get it into the bin as quick as possible, but I wondered why he hadn't put a slightly better shirt on.

"What's happening?" I asked, stationing myself on the side of the bed farthest away from Eric. I picked up some underwear out of the basket and folded it before putting it on the bed.

"Well" Eric said, reaching over and picking up another pair of underpants, before carelessly folding them in half and tossing them down on the bed. "I thought we could make laundry folding more exciting."

"How?" I asked. I probably sounded sceptical, but then, I was. I had been doing this for a long time and I had yet to crack the secret of making it more fun. Or fun at all.

"This" Eric said. "Is topless laundry folding."

I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. You had to give him points for trying, but I couldn't see how that made it more fun.

"I can't see how that's going to make it more fun" I said, when I recovered.

"Oh. It'll be fun Sookie. Trust me." Eric eyed my chest hopefully.

"Well…" I said, looking at him. OK, the view was nice. "Maybe I could do it in my bra?"

Eric sighed. "That's a start" he said, "But it's not quite in the spirit of the thing."

"Yeah, but just remember Eric" I said. "It's easier if there aren't things getting in my way when I'm using my arms. I'm just saying, the bra helps with that."

"OK" Eric said. "Bra it is then. I'll help." He grabbed the hem of my t-shirt and pulled it over my head. Kind of roughly.

"Ow!" I said, as he pulled my hair a bit.

"You're fine" he assured me, in the same way he assured the kids they were fine when he didn't really care.

He tossed my t-shirt to the side and grinned at me. "Well that's a start" he said.

"It's about as far as I'm going" I said, folding another item of clothing.

"You're not really entering into the spirit of topless laundry folding yet, are you Sookie?" Eric said, frowning at me.

"At least I'm folding the bloody laundry" I said to Eric. "All you're worried about is who's topless and who isn't." And then I picked up someone's underwear and threw it at him. It caught him nicely on the side of the head.

"OK" Eric said, narrowing his eyes to look at me. "If that's going to be your attitude." He picked something up out of the basket and threw it at me. I ducked below the bed, thinking I'd been smart. I hadn't counted on Eric just upending the basket so the laundry rained down on me, the floor and the bed.

"That's not fair" I said, throwing a bra at him, but he dodged over the other side of the bedroom. I could see he was trying to get around to my side of the bed, so I got on and started trying to crawl across it to get clear of him. He has long arms though, and he grabbed my ankle.

"Hey!" I warned, although I wasn't sure why I was warning him really. He didn't seem particularly keen on listening to my concerns.

Scrambling to get away from Eric I managed to reach a hand to a pillow, and I grabbed it and kind of swept it behind me in the hope it might connect with Eric who was back there somewhere, still with one hand on my ankle.

Except that he wasn't, because he took the pillow out of my hand and then half-landed on my back. "Ha!" he said, like there was some kind of triumph in pinning me to the bed. I wanted to tell him there wasn't, because it wasn't like it had been that hard a fight, but that would reflect badly on me I decided, so I stayed quiet.

"No wonder I didn't want to be topless" I muttered. "I can't give you any sign of encouragement."

"You're encouraging me? Fucking excellent" Eric said, and he pinned me a bit tighter to the bed.

"Oi! Off!" I said, trying to wriggle away. That never was my smartest move in these situations.

"That wiggling is definitely encouraging, Sookie" Eric said, sounding happy, and putting his arms around me to hold me tightly. "I think this is the most fun I've ever had folding laundry."

"There's no folded laundry!" I said. "It's all over the floor. Some of it we're lying on."

"Oh well" Eric said, he didn't sound repentant about preventing me from ticking another item off my list today. I figured I was probably lucky to have got through as much of it as I did.

"How about instead of topless laundry folding we try something else?" Eric said, kissing the back of my neck.

"What?" I asked.

"Topless sex" Eric said.

"Well, you know" I said. "That I could probably even get naked for."

"Fucking awesome idea, Sookie."

And it was a great idea, until we heard the front door open and Sam call out "It's us! Where are you?" just as Eric had finished and rested his weight down on me.

"Crap" I said. "Off, off, off." The bedroom door was partially open because, when we'd started, we'd been the only ones home. Well, us and Ivan and the cats, but none of the animals seemed that inclined to interrupt.

Although now that I thought about it, the panting I could hear suggested we had had an audience and Ivan had come to see what Eric was doing now.

Eric didn't seem to be that inclined to move, but I pushed him off and grabbed my clothes, listening to the sound of footsteps in the hallway and praying they didn't come this far too fast. Eric just watched me.

"You could get dressed" I said. "Before they wonder why you mysteriously lost all your clothes in the middle of the afternoon."

Eric sighed. "I'll just tell them we were doing naked laundry folding" he said, but he did manage to locate some underwear and pull it on. I hoped they were the ones he'd started with and he hadn't mixed up his other pair with the clean washing. Although that wasn't the biggest problem as I could hear Sam's voice going "Mum? Mum?"

"I'm in the bedroom" I called out. "I'll be out in a minute!"

"Can we make toasted sandwiches?" Sam asked from the hallway.

"Yes" I called back, knowing it would mean a terrible mess to clean up after they used the toasted sandwich maker we had, one of those old-fashioned ones which sealed the edges of the sandwiches as they made them. It was very popular in our house.

"Mummy!" Pam called out. "I had fun and…what happened to MY BED!"

I gave Eric a look, but he shrugged and looked nonchalant, at least until Pam pushed her way into the bedroom. "My bed isn't right" she said to me. "I just…you know how it goes! You do, because we do it all the time together, and I wasn't here and now it's wrong. That's just…just…wrong!"

"Daddy did it" I said, pointing to Eric who was sitting on the bed and pulling his t-shirt over his head. Yeah, he hadn't lost that one. Bugger.

"Oh" she said, a bit taken aback both by Eric's presence and the fact he was to blame for her troubles. "Oh, you're home Daddy." She walked over and climbed into Eric's lap.

"I came home early" Eric said, "So you could tell me how your first Friday went." I'm sure I rolled my eyes at that, but it was a nice deflection and seemed to work and I left the pair of them chatting happily.

Sure enough the kitchen was pretty messy when I got there. So much for tidying it earlier. "Tray" I said. "Go and get out of your uniform." Tray sighed, but stomped off. Sam had, at least, changed before he'd started and he was wearing trackpants in a state to rival Eric's.

Eric appeared just as the first lot of sandwiches were ready. "Oh" Sam said. "Dad's here."

"Yep" Eric confirmed. "I came home early."

"Well I can make you one" Sam said.

"What's the choices?" Eric asked suspiciously.

"Um…cheese and spaghetti, cheese and baked beans, or Mum's favourite, cheese and creamed corn." Eric didn't look enthused, he wasn't a fan of the add something in a can type of toasted sandwich.

"I couldn't have just grilled cheese?" Eric asked Sam.

"No, it's toasties" Sam said. The boys loved the idea of anything in a toasted sandwich, and the more fillings the better, although the lamb and Yorkshire pudding ones hadn't been a great success and had mostly made Eric sad about the loss of his leftovers.

"Oh…um. Fuck. Baked beans then" Eric said, sighing.

Sam made several batches of sandwiches and piled them up on a plate on the table and Tray sat there helping himself. Pam came in and surveyed the selection before picking one. "I fixed my bed!" she said brightly.

"Well that's good" I said, blowing on the filling of my sandwich.

"Because no one told Daddy there was a system!" she continued. "So he couldn't help it. Poor Daddy."

"Mmm" I said, as Eric stared intently at his sandwich and didn't meet my gaze.

Felicia arrived home next. "What's happening dudes?" she said, walking into the kitchen and dropping her bag on the floor. "Why're you home?" she asked Eric, coming over to take a sandwich.

"He stayed home to help Mummy" Pam said cheerfully. "'Cos I wasn't here to do it."

"Yeah. That'll be it" I said, from where I was standing trying to clean the burnt cheese off the toasted sandwich maker.

Felicia looked from Pam to Eric and shrugged, before leaving the kitchen, and her bag. I heard her yell "Who put all that shit on my bed?" but from the sound of it, she decided it was Sam and went after him. I saw him take off into the garden and I think she lost interest anyway. Poor Sam.

Amelia turned up half an hour later. "Where were you?" Eric asked her.

"With Chloe. And, um…Riley. Why're you home?" she asked, grumpiness covering up the embarrassment she felt about Riley. At least, that's what I deduced from the blush that spread across her face when she said his name.

"I live here" Eric said, sounding grumpy himself. "Why does everyone keep fucking asking me that?"

"Your bed looks like mine" Felicia said, coming back in. "There's crap all over it. What did you do?"

"What do you mean?" I asked, winding up the cord of the toasted sandwich maker so I could pack it away.

"Well…you were home all day, and the place is a tip. I don't have a duvet on the bed" Felicia grumbled. Yeah, crap. I hadn't put them out yet. I glanced at Eric, but he had his head down intent on the homework he was helping Pam with.

Sam came back in, eyed up Felicia, and decided to brazen it out. "What's for dinner?" he asked. Oh, double crap. I hadn't done the prep for that either.

"You just had toasties" I reminded him, and he shrugged. "Oh, it's uh…something with mince" I said. "That's as far as I've got."

"Um…cottage pie?" Sam suggested.

"No" I said.

"Lasagne?" Felicia asked. I shook my head.

"Nachos?" Tray asked, probably trying for what he thought might have the least vegetable content.

"No…I don't have any beans" I admitted.

"Um…meatloaf?" Pam said. "The one with the chickpeas and tomatoes around it?"

"I just want the chickpeas and tomatoes" Amelia said. "I don't want the stinky mince."

"It's not meatloaf" I said. "It'll have to be something quick. Spaghetti bolognaise I think."

"That sounds good" Eric said, to a chorus of sighs from the kids who didn't think it did.

"So, if there's no dinner, what did you do? All day? By yourself?" Felicia asked. She wasn't going to let that go.

"Well… I did some washing, and stuff…" I said. "And Daddy was here…"

"All day?" Felicia asked. "Why? What?" She looked at me, and I looked at the sink, and then she looked at Eric, and then she did something completely un-Felicia like and blushed. Really, deeply blushed bright pink. "Oh" she said.

"What?" Sam asked.

"You don't want to know" she said to him. She was probably right.

Felicia turned and left the kitchen and I was just going to pretend I didn't hear her say to Amelia, who followed her out, "At least I didn't have to hear them today!"

I sighed. Oh well, it was only one Friday. Surely Eric wouldn't do this again? And slowly but surely I'd work through my list and people wouldn't ask me what I'd done all day.

EPOV

The day had actually been pretty fucking good, once Sookie got over her grumpiness. And we got a lot of shit done.

I'd just have to make sure I came home on the next wet Friday. I still had hopes for sex on the dryer. That'd be pretty awesome too.

**Thanks for reading!**


	18. Chapter 18

**A/N Well I'm slowly getting there, but have had almost no time to write which doesn't seem fair. Oh well. I do have a lovely, but incredibly jumbled, advent calendar (or candaleer as the toddler calls it). Because the cows go in the sky but the angels should be in the manger. It's the weirdest nativity scene ever. **

**Oh and it'll probably help with this one if you know that Matakana is pronounced Mat-ah-car-nah.**

**Disclaimer: Nope, not mine.**

SPOV

Eric eyed the Barbies lined up on the hall table suspiciously. "What I will never understand" he said, "is why they have to dress like off-duty strippers all the time. What's with the miniskirts and boots?"

"What I don't understand" I said, "is why they're all coming with us. And possibly why you know what off-duty strippers dress like."

"Mmm. Probably from TV. You know, crime shows. Or something" Eric said thoughtfully.

"Definitely something" I agreed.

"But I don't get who she's marrying" he added.

"Well…Hunter. It is his wedding."

Eric sighed. "Not…um, her…" Yeah, there wasn't a hope in hell of Eric remembering Jenny's name. "The Barbie that isn't a stripper. The one in the wedding dress. I mean…where's Ken?"

"Seriously, Eric? We have five kids we have to pack up and transport to a wedding and you're worried we're leaving Ken behind?"

"Well, it was a just a question Sookie" Eric said, somewhat huffily. "I don't fucking get what the rules of all these games are, but I would have thought that if you were going to play Barbies _and_ have a wedding then it would be pretty fucking important to include a groom."

"Well…you'll have to ask Pam. And while you're at it, tell her that she can't bring five Barbies. It's two maximum."

Eric sighed, but he walked off. Probably not to have that conversation with Pam, but he was no longer fretting about Ken being left behind, so that was an improvement. Probably.

I felt like I'd been going flat-tack all day at this point. We'd had soccer in the morning starting at the ungodly hour of 8am for Pam's game. Pam wasn't exactly shaping up to be a natural at sports like some of her siblings, but what she lacked in ball-handling skills she more than made up for in her ability to make sneaky tackles. Most of the little boys didn't know what had happened as Pam stripped them of the ball and took off. I felt kind of sorry for them; it was a hard way to learn that you can't judge a book by its cover.

And then there'd been Tray's game, and Sam's game, for which Tray got to be a substitute player and he was thrilled to be playing with the bigger boys. Sam was a bit less thrilled to have his brother suddenly promoted to his team and spent probably far too much of the game watching what Tray was doing and not the ball. The situation wasn't really helped when Tray scored a goal.

Finally we had Felicia's game, and trying to keep Pam and the boys enthused to make it through watching that was a bit of a hassle. By that stage they'd eaten all the snacks I'd brought, they were fed up with hanging around on a field, and they were bored and grumpy. Eric was grumpy as well because he didn't like the referee they had and thought Felicia had been unfairly penalised. I thought Felicia had done pretty well for getting away with what she had, and I felt really sorry for the girl who was now nursing a large bruise on her calf.

But eventually we'd been able to pack up, go home, rouse Amelia who'd spent the morning doing some mythical 'homework', and then it was in the car and off to Matakana for Hunter's wedding.

I really just wanted a sit down about now.

I walked into the kitchen where Tray and Sam were finishing up eating their lunch. "Did you leave any in the freezer?" I asked them.

Tray shook his head. "Nah" he said. "We'll need more, Mum."

I sighed. I seemed to be forever making food for them these days. In desperation I'd pulled out an old recipe that Mum had made for Jason and me when we were growing up and I'd started stocking the freezer with ranch burgers. Ranch burgers were very popular. So popular they didn't last long.

"You can do that…uh, Friday?" Sam suggested, I guess he was trying to give me useful things I could do, which was sweet, but not overly helpful. I had a list already.

"Mmm" I said. "Maybe we'll do it one day after school and you can help?" There wasn't really much to it, just shoving the mixture into the rolls once it was made.

"OK" Sam agreed, shrugging.

"So are you guys packed?" I asked them.

"Um…yeah?" Tray half-replied, half-asked.

"Well…if it's not packed, it's not coming" I said, just as Pam arrived in the kitchen, pulling her small trolley-case behind her. "I'm ready!" she announced.

"OK" I said. "Um…I have bad news, Pam. We can't take everyone with us."

"Really?" she asked, looking at her brothers with barely-concealed joy.

"Yeah, two Barbies. Maximum."

"Oh. But I…but if they all don't come, then they can't do the wedding. I need all the guests."

"Well, Daddy was worried that you didn't have a groom, but that's beside the point. Two Barbies."

"Or no Barbies" Felicia said, coming in.

"Felicia, you still have mud all up your arm, did you even have a shower?" I asked her.

"Yeah" she said. "Chill. It's just mud." She made a half-heartedly attempt to rub it off with her hand.

"Go to the bathroom and get it off properly" I said, and Felicia sighed, but left the room.

"I have to go and break it to them that they can't have the wedding and it's not going to be like we thought" Pam muttered, and she walked off trailing the case behind her. Mr Fluffy looked miserable from where he was strapped to the top of it. Poor Mr Fluffy.

Eric was putting bags in the hallway by the sound of it. "Ivan, fuck off!" he said.

"Poor Ivan, he just wants to be your friend" Amelia said to Eric.

"I don't need a friend who is sitting where I want to put the fucking bags" Eric explained, but I'm not sure Amelia really cared because I heard her going back to her room and leaving Eric to it. I figured that was the best plan too, and did a last sweep of my bedroom to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything. We were driving for about an hour up to Matakana to the motel we were staying at for the night, and then going on to the vineyard for a 4 o'clock wedding, which was kind of ambitious at this time of year. I just hoped the rain held off.

EPOV

I was looking at the pile of bags that had built up in the hall and wondering how the fuck I was going to get all of that shit, plus all the kids in the car. And not end up with Ivan, who was sniffing around and getting excited, coming too. He was going next door to stay with Kennedy and Danny, so he was shit out of luck.

"I don't want to go" Tray said.

"No" I agreed, it was pretty clear he wasn't thrilled at the plan for the rest of the day.

"So I don't have to?" he asked.

"No, I have to fucking go to it, so you have to as well. It's a family wedding, apparently. So it's for all of us."

"But…uh…um…there's um…well, Aunty Linda will want to kiss us. And stuff" Sam said, looking embarrassed about that.

"You're young, she smokes. You've got the advantage" I said to them. "Just keep moving and don't fucking look back." I was far more worried about the luggage. I suspected that Amelia had put two bags out and there was no way we could take that much.

"I don't think it's that bad" Sookie's voice said from a doorway. Fuck, she wasn't supposed to hear that. It was that bad though. I felt kind of sorry for the boys, when they were small they'd had no chance against Aunty Linda's over-zealous affection. Hopefully they were big enough now to fend her off, but there wasn't much I could do if they weren't. They'd have to fucking cope with it.

"She just likes you guys" Sookie said to the boys, who clearly looked like they didn't believe her, but I think she chose to ignore that fact.

"Are we ready to go?" Sookie asked.

"Well, I am, but at this rate it's just going to be me and the luggage. How much is Amelia taking?" I asked Sookie.

"Oh…I'll talk to her" Sookie said, and she left.

"So, I _don't_ have to go?" Tray asked.

SPOV

Getting everyone out the door and on the road took a lot longer than I'd hoped. I don't know why I always thought it would be better, but it never was. Even dropping Ivan off next door took a while as Pam insisted on coming too, then insisted on telling Kassidy all about the wedding, and her dress for the wedding, and how exciting the wedding was going to be. Meanwhile Ivan sat and looked at me with big eyes, probably trying to silently tell me how mad Eric was going to be with me when he found out I'd given away his most loyal subject. Yeah, he'd live.

And then there was the usual amount of swearing about the stuff we needed to take and why we needed to take it and how it was only one night and surely seven pairs of clean underwear and a few toothbrushes shouldn't take up all this room from Eric. Tray and Sam had a fight about who got to sit where. Felicia told Tray and Sam to stop fighting while punching each of them in the leg in turn. Pam complained that there was no room left for her in the car with all the fists flying about and couldn't she just for once sit in the good seat by the window, and then, finally, Amelia arrived clutching a bag which maybe contained some really, really important homework and couldn't possibly be left behind, and that set Eric off again.

I sat in the passenger seat and pondered the viability of offering to drive myself in Eric's car and therefore free up this seat. It sounded like a great plan about now, and imagining myself all alone in a car appealed immensely, except maybe for the part where I drove past the people mover that was weaving across three lanes of the motorway because its driver had lost the plot and was currently facing the back seats laying down the law. Or the part where I had to pick up five kids from off the side of the road where Eric had abandoned them.

Or the part where I got to the wedding and found they'd all buggered off somewhere else and I had to spend the entire reception being questioned about where my family had gone by people who were looking for the salacious details of some terrible accident.

No, the truth was they were my family and I was stuck with them.

I turned to look at the occupants of the back seats. "Are you going to be warm enough?" I asked Felicia.

"Yeah" she said. She was wearing her best winter clothes which consisted of shorts and tank-top over which she wore an enormous grey cardigan which came down past the shorts. On her feet she had her grey Chuck Taylors on.

"You're not wearing that to the wedding, are you?" Pam asked worriedly.

"No" I said, at the same time as Felicia replied "Dunno. Might."

"It's not that exciting, Pam" Amelia said. "It's just _family_. Who cares what you wear?"

"Well…I care" Pam said. "I care what I wear."

Amelia shrugged, Felicia shoved Sam into Tray, Pam bit her lip and looked thoughtful, and then Eric got in the car and said "Let's fucking get going then" like he'd been waiting for us.

The trip started out OK. No one liked my idea of a sing-a-long. Actually, Felicia was a bit rude about my singing, and I could see Eric smirking while she was complaining that it was bad enough having to sit in the back with her brothers, she didn't need to go deaf as well.

There was no pleasing some people.

It wasn't until we were past Albany that things really got tense though. "What the fuck?" Eric asked, as the petrol light flashed on with a bing sound. Oops. I had meant to fill up the car.

"Yeah…" I said. "It was getting a bit low…"

"And now it's very low, Sookie" Eric said, in measured tones. "It's very fucking low and we need to stop for gas."

"It's…" but I let the word 'petrol' die on my lips. No reason to make Eric any madder than he already was. "There's coffee there" I said. "You could get a coffee." I smiled at him, but he wasn't looking in my direction and missed it. Well, fine then. He could sit and stew and ruin it all.

We pulled into the big petrol station just off the motorway at Silverdale. I remembered back when the motorway stopped long before this point, and I was about to say that when I realised that if no one appreciated my singing, then my stories of the extension of the Northern Motorway and resulting toll-road through to State Highway 16 weren't going to be appreciated either.

I'd just have to wait until I saw Jason, and then we could reminisce about it.

"You'll have to give me one of those vouchers" Eric said, still sounding grumpy.

"What? Oh. I haven't got any. Not for this chain of stations" I said, and Eric gave me a filthy look before getting out of the car.

"Dad!" Tray called, scrambling out of his seat. "I'll do it!"

Eric called out "What?", but it was a bit muffled as we were in the car and he wasn't now, but Tray managed to clamber over Pam and Amelia, much to their annoyance, and get out the door himself. Usually it was Sam who wanted to help, except when it came to car stuff, and then it was all Tray. He loved putting the petrol in the car, and was kind of sad when I told him stories about how, in the days before child restraints or many cars with automatic transmissions, Jason had sat on the passenger seat of Mum's old Morris 1100 and changed gear for her as we drove around Papatoetoe.

"Are we going inside?" Pam asked, looking at the big complex which housed not only the petrol station, but a café, Burger King and some kind of tourist souvenir shop.

"Um…no" I said. "No, I'd lose someone."

"That's not a good reason for us all to stay in the car" Felicia muttered.

"I'm kind of hungry" Sam said.

"You had all those ranch burgers!" I pointed out. "Anyway, I have mandarins."

Amelia, who'd had her ear-phones in and had been pretending we didn't exist, tuned in. "Are we going in?" she asked, and then she ignored Sam and Felicia both yelling "No!" at her, and leaned forward to talk to me. "But I want to get coffee" she said. "And Dad'll be getting coffee."

"Oh…fine!" I said, realising when I was defeated.

Eric opened up the door to get his wallet and I said I'd park the car and meet him inside. "Can't we just go with Dad?" Pam whined, and I relented and was left watching Eric stride across the forecourt with all the kids trailing behind him like a mother duck and her ducklings.

I parked the car and went inside to locate everyone. Amelia was in the queue at the café. "Where's the rest of them?" I asked.

Amelia shrugged. "Pam's gone to the loo and Dad left me some money to get the coffees. He said to get you one, so you don't fall asleep again."

"I didn't fall asleep!" I said. "I just closed my eyes for a bit." It had been kind of stuffy in the car, and the movement was soothing.

"Yeah, yeah" Amelia said, not looking particularly sorry.

"So you don't know where Dad is?" I tried again, but Amelia just shrugged, and continued shuffling along in the queue. I scanned the queues of people paying for their petrol, but I couldn't see Eric. He was usually pretty easy to spot.

Pam and Felicia strolled up. "Can we get a burger?" Felicia asked.

"No, you just had lunch" I said. "I said no to Sam before."

"But they are! Look!" Pam said, pointing at the Burger King counter. Sure enough, I could spot Eric down there. Along with his two off-siders who'd forgotten about the ranch burgers they'd eaten earlier and were now on to second lunch. It was like living with hobbits sometimes.

"Fine" I said. "Go and join them then."

The impromptu meal added more time to our journey and meant the afternoon was dragging on as we drove on down the toll road and past Wellsford. I liked being out here, in the country, but I had no desire to live out here. I stared out the window at the gravel driveways which just seemed to disappear into nothing but trees and wonder who the hell would live out here? Sure it was near the coast and really not that far from Auckland these days, but even so, it would be so lonely. I liked the city. Well, my suburb in the city, anyway. I quite liked my neighbours, even if Mrs Bodehouse's recycling bin clinked suspiciously from the amount of gin bottles she had stashed in there, but she was pleasant. Mostly pleasant. Mr Furnan was a bit of a pain in the bum, but it was just unfortunate he'd been on the receiving end of a few choice words from Eric the time that Ivan got out. I think he might have actually liked the rest of us.

So no, I had no plans to move out here and live with nothing but the moreporks and the sheep for company. No plans at all.

Jason was weird.

Eric was following the instructions on the GPS and it got us all to Matakana no problem. Unfortunately its knowledge of Matakana itself was a bit crappy and it directed us down an alley to the back entrance of the motel, which didn't seem to exist, as there was only a rusty old gate and a really old black and white dog that sat and looked at us.

Eric said a few choice words as he tried to manoeuvre my vehicle back down the alley and Tray muttered that we should have brought Ivan so he could have had a friend. I quietly pointed out that Matakana had a branch of Nosh now, but I don't think it was appreciated.

The GPS nearly got biffed out the window onto Matakana Valley Road, and we went back around the roundabout, and I pointed out the entrance to the motel which we'd driven past a few minutes before, so Eric could come to a screeching halt and turn into a driveway which was narrower than the alley we'd just been down and try to find a parking spot big enough for our car.

And then, finally, we were there, and I could let out a sigh of relief.

EPOV

That fucking GPS was supposed to have the most up to date maps of fucking New Zealand. But no, it had no fucking clue about where it was going half the time. And it didn't seem to care, either. Probably because it didn't have to listen to five fucking kids all moaning because we hadn't made it to our destination yet.

Although it might not have been so bad if we hadn't found the motel. "You're sure this is it?" I asked Sookie.

"Yep" she said. "Matakana Motel. I think they only have the one."

OK. Well, it was only for one night. Although you couldn't fucking tell that from the amount of luggage everyone had packed. Sure, we were going to this wedding, and we needed to get dressed for it…but, shit, did we really need all that stuff?

I got out of the car and walked into the office. Only there was no one there to see me. Apart from the large orange cat sitting on the counter, that is. I rang the bell and the cat gave me a look that suggested he really wished I hadn't fucking done that, and then eventually a woman appeared from the door at the back, looking slightly harassed.

"Booking for Northman" I said, and the woman looked at something on the computer, and then squinted, and frowned, and clicked a few things, and I realised what had happened. "Try Stackhouse" I suggested.

"Oh, there you are!" she said brightly. "You've got…units two. And three…is that right?"

"Yep" I said.

"And the trolley bed…" she added frowning, and then looking up at me. The cat seemed to be fucking frowning at me too.

"Yes" I confirmed, wondering what her problem was. We were paying for the rooms and the extra bed.

"OK…so there's the keys, just sign here" she said, pushing the register towards me. "Are you here for the wedding at Ascension vineyard?" she asked as I was signing. I briefly contemplated not answering because, fuck it, why was it any business of her's? But I figured it would be kind of rude.

"Yes" I said in the end, hoping that would suffice.

"Mmm. It's lovely there, but it's a funny time of year for an outdoor wedding. Well, hopefully they'll have an indoor backup venue. The forecast was for showers, but I haven't seen any yet, so they're either not coming or they're coming soon. You know what the weather's like!"

Fuck, did I have to answer that one? I weighed it up. "Yes" I said in the end, figuring that covered all the bases of that little conversation.

"OK, well I'll let you get unpacked. There's milk in the fridge and if you need anything else, just give me a shout, OK?"

"Yes" I said. "Thank-you." She smiled and disappeared out through the door again where I could hear her saying "No, Finlay, don't do that to your sister!" followed by a squeal, a shout, a loud thud and some crying. I looked at the cat, and he looked at me. Yeah, fuck it. If I was him I'd sit in the office too.

SPOV

The motel unit that Eric and I had was advertised as the honeymoon suite, although why a honeymoon suite needed two bedrooms, I didn't know. I think it was just designated that because it had a huge spa bath in the bathroom. I looked at it longingly as I put my cosmetic bag on the vanity. It wasn't often we were anywhere near a bath which would fit both Eric and I in comfortably, but I didn't think we'd get to use this while we were here. Which seemed a shame.

The other bedroom in our unit was going to be occupied by the boys, and Pam would have the trolley bed in the living room, although she was currently campaigning to move next door to stay with Amelia and Felicia in their studio unit. "Because then it will be all girls!" Pam was saying to Eric, as he carried bags in. "So that would be like…a…a…pyjama party!"

"I don't want to have a pyjama party" Felicia grumbled, as she mooched around. "It's bad enough I have to share a bed with Amelia, I don't want to party with her."

"I'll sleep in that bed!" Pam said, enthusiastically. "And you can have the trolley bed!"

"OK" Felicia said. "But you have to tell Amelia."

Pam shrugged, and the pair of them disappeared to the unit next door, presumably to tell Amelia about the new sleeping arrangements. "Well, that worked out OK" Eric said. I wasn't sure whether he was taking the credit for that one or not, so I just nodded and went to hang up my dress on the garment rack in the main bedroom.

Sam and Tray had already escaped out the unit by this time. There were ranchsliders which opened onto a deck and a small strip of grass that ran behind all the units in the complex. On the other side of the grass was a field. And some cows who'd come to hang over the fence and check out the newcomers.

Eric moved out onto the deck. "I didn't realise it would be the fucking country" he said, looking with distaste at the cows and ignoring the two boys having a fight on this side of the fence.

"Oi!" I yelled at them. "Knock it off!"

And at that moment a cloud of smoke two decks down suddenly called out "Sookie, love! Is that you?"

Eric gave me a look and disappeared back inside the unit as quick as anything, while I leaned out and called back "Hi Aunty Linda!", before I clambered over the railing and dropped down onto the grass. It wasn't an elegant manoeuvre on my part. I walked past the unit the girls were in and pretended I couldn't see Amelia standing in front of the bathroom door and blocking it, while engaged in a heated discussion with Felicia, presumably about who got to use it first.

Aunty Linda leaned over the railing of her deck and kissed my cheek. It would have been a lot nicer if she hadn't smelt quite so strongly of smoke. "So you all made it up here then?" she said, looking around. Possibly for Eric.

"Yeah" I said. "Although it was touch and go when the GPS got the entrance to the motel wrong and we went past it. Eric wasn't impressed."

"Mmm" Aunty Linda said. "Don't suppose he knows the area."

I was tempted to point out that neither did I particularly well, but I left it. "So are they all set?" I asked instead.

"Well, I think so. I have to say though, that Had's taking it all a bit seriously. She's been all over the bloody place today, worrying about where the candles were on the table and things like that. I don't think anyone cares about the candles, but Jenny's mother made them…that's her business, she sells then on-line. That's it isn't it Trev? She sells the candles?" Aunty Linda looked back into the unit, but there was silence, so she carried on. "So Had was worried that Jenny's mum Ange was going to get all bent out of shape. But I can't see she'd mind. _That_ much." Aunty Linda sighed, and took a long drag of her cigarette. "Weddings. They're such a big deal these days. In my day you just had a nice meal at the Rotary Club or the Cossie Club and that was it. None of this…you know. Table decorations." She wrinkled her nose and stared into space.

And then Hadley herself appeared. "Oh Mum, stop going on about the table decorations" she said. "_Everyone_ does them these days; if you look in the magazines they're all about the table setting." She frowned at Linda, who frowned back. It was uncanny how alike they looked.

"Shouldn't the bride be the one looking at wedding magazines?" Aunty Linda said dryly, and Hadley looked down. Yeah, poor thing. She'd never had a wedding of her own. Mother of the groom was as good as it got for her.

Although you had to wonder how Jenny felt about her new mother in law's help. I briefly remembered my wedding to Bill and Lorena's tears when we wouldn't invite every member of her extended family, and Bill's eventual backing down to his mother's demands which had made me slightly grumpy about the whole thing as we were footing the cost of it all.

Yeah, I'd got off lightly with Eric.

"Anyway" Hadley said. "Hello, Sookie, and it's nice you could come."

"Oh…no problem…" I said, wondering why I always felt about fourteen around Hadley. She wasn't _that_ much older than me, really. And these days you could debate whether she was more sophisticated, but she still made me feel…well, a bit hopeless really.

I was trying to work out what to say when a small voice inside the unit said "Gwan? Gwanny?" and out trotted Jenny and Hunter's son Ryder who must be…nearly two? He blinked several times and then held his hands out to Hadley.

Well, that kind of put things in perspective. Hadley was a gran now. That was really odd, actually, because she so wasn't like Gran it any way, shape or form. But Aunty Linda had always been Nan to Hunter, as Gran was still alive when he was born, so I guessed Hadley had to find an alternative to use.

It was all deeply, unsettlingly weird. When did Hadley get old enough to be someone's grandmother?

Hadley swung him up onto her hip and he looked at her with his hazel eyes. "Up Gwanny" he said.

"Yep, you're up" Hadley agreed. "And now we've got to get you ready."

Ryder nodded sleepily, and clung tighter to the stuffed giraffe he was holding, while he continued to eye me suspiciously. He was very cute and he made me slightly nostalgic for the days when Sam and Tray were that cute. There was a shout of "Stop being such a cock, Sam!", but I refused to turn around. My memories were nice and I was sticking with them for the moment.

I stayed and chatted to Hadley and Aunty Linda for a bit, and then just Aunty Linda when Hadley took Ryder off to their unit. "I can't believe she's a grandmother" I said, still dazed by that one.

"Yep, and I'm a great-grandmother. Shit, love. Who'd have thought, eh?" I looked at Aunty Linda, and I realised she wasn't wrong. Between the potential for skin cancer and lung cancer Aunty Linda seemed to have dodged a lot of bullets over the years. The rest of us should be so lucky.

"Well, I better get back and get ready" I said, as on cue Pam came out onto her deck and said "Mum! Mum, Amelia won't let me in the bathroom and she's being bossy and she's not the boss of me. Leesha says Amelia's not the boss of her, so she's not the boss of me either, is she? Is she?"

"No" I said. "She's not, and just…well, if she's not out soon I'll come back. I have to go and get ready now myself."

"Fine!" Pam huffed, and she went inside.

"I guess I'd better go and sort it all out" I said, not really looking forward to the prospect.

"Yep" Aunty Linda said. "That's a lot of kids you've got, eh?"

"Mmm" I agreed.

"But then you've got Eric, haven't you?" Aunty Linda said, giving me a wink.

"Mmm" I said again. It seemed to be the safest option. Aunty Linda sighed heavily and then said "See you there then, love" and went inside her motel unit.

I stopped in to check on the girls and remind Felicia that she needed to get changed, Amelia that she needed to share the bathroom, and Pam that she didn't need her hair straightened with Amelia's new hair-straighteners because it would be a totally redundant process on her hair. Well, they were Kennedy's old hair-straighteners, and Amelia was, in theory, buying them off her in return for baby-sitting. I didn't know how well that was going to work out once the novelty of sitting in Kennedy's house at night wore off, but it was their arrangement and I was keeping out of it.

I walked back into our unit to find Eric had at least started getting the boys ready. The three of them must have been in the bathroom by the shouts I could hear of "Dad! That smells foul! I'm dying!" I was so glad that I was next in line for that space, I really was. And that I'd have about twenty minutes to make myself presentable at the rate we were going.

I went into the bedroom and laid my dress on the bed. And then I heard the knocking at the door. "Sook?" Jason called out. "Sook? Crys says I need a bloody tie and I didn't bring one. Does Eric have a fuckin' spare?"

I took a deep breath. It was going to be a long evening.

**A/N Papatoetoe is Pap-ah-toe-ee-toe-ee, or, more correctly, Pap-ah-toy-toy.**

**Moreporks are the New Zealand native owls, named after the sound they make which is similar to someone saying "more pork". Their name in Maori is ruru (roo roo).**

**Cossie club is short for Cosmopolitan Club. So similar to the Rotary Club.**

**Ranch burgers are basically a mixture of cooked bacon, tomato sauce (ketchup), mustard, onion and cheese, spread into long rolls and then frozen to be microwaved as needed. Very useful for when you have people who graze in the house. If you need the recipe, let me know!**

**Thanks for reading and Merry Christmas, or, as the toddler would say, Berry Crippen!**


	19. Chapter 19

**A/N Well I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas. I now have a two year old with a Pavlovian response to the word presents, and if she hears it she'll immediately start to rip paper off anything to hand, even the present she's just helped you wrap for her dad. **

**Disclaimer: None of this was under my Christmas tree.**

EPOV

The quick way to find out what little shits your kids were was to lock yourself in a bathroom with them and try to get ready for something. That brought it home to me pretty fucking fast.

"But I don't see why we have to go?" Tray whined.

"Because you do. Have you brushed your teeth?" I asked, while watching Sam brush his.

"No…because. Oh, fuck. I did them this morning."

"Well, fucking do them again."

"Where's Mum?" Sam asked, spitting out toothpaste and moving away from the sink to make way for Tray.

"That's not going to help you, Sam" I pointed out. "She's busy and we're getting ready."

"I was just asking the question!" Sam said, bristling, and sounding a lot like Sookie when she got really pissed off with me.

"Stop asking questions. We are not here to ask questions. We are here to get ready so we can go to this fucking wedding and not embarrass your mother. She has Uncle Jason for that."

At least that statement made them both start sniggering and stop trying to fucking argue with me. And there was more sniggering, when, as if on cue, we could hear Jason arrive at the door of the motel and start talking to Sookie.

"Uncle Jase's embarrassing!" Tray said, like that was the most fucking amusing thing ever.

"He might hear you" Sam said, while still sniggering as well.

"But he's embarrassing! So…so, he won't be embarrassed! It'll be _funny_!" Tray seemed pretty convinced of that fact, and I didn't want to put him straight.

Jason called out "Thanks, Eric mate!" and I heard the door close. I wondered briefly if he was being ironic and making a point about the current topic of conversation in the bathroom, but then I remembered that it was Jason.

"You're embarrassing!" Sam said to Tray.

"No. You are!" Tray said, and I realised that I'd lost my audience again.

"OK" I said, "Sam, brush your hair."

SPOV

I sorted Jason out with a tie, hopefully it wasn't the tie Eric particularly wanted to wear, and then I laid the boys' clothes out on their bed, having carried them up here in my bag to make sure nothing got left behind accidentally-on-purpose, and then all I could do was kind of hover, waiting for the bathroom to be free. After a couple of minutes Sam and Tray appeared looking…well, looking like they'd actually given two hoots about how they looked for once. Or that someone else had. At any rate, the effect was quite nice.

"You guys look really good" I said to them, and they both looked at me like I'd totally lost the plot.

"OK. Well, go and get changed then" I said to them. "Clothes are on the bed in your room."

"I got changed after soccer" Tray complained.

"So you know what to do then" Eric said, as he passed us walking from the bathroom into the bedroom he and I were using.

Tray sighed, but he and Sam left and I took my chance to grab the bathroom. Only I got pipped at the post by Felicia who zoomed in the front door of the motel unit and yelled "Amelia won't let me in to wee."

"Oh…well. Never mind" I said, hoping she'd be quick. She was, and when she re-emerged I took the opportunity to check that she'd dressed. I'd managed to persuade her to wear an old navy dress of Amelia's, which was fairly plain with a drop-waist and covered in small pink flowers. Felicia, though, had decided to accessorise with not only the thick navy tights I'd bought her, but her grey cardigan and Chuck Taylors. I figured there was no point pressing her to leave those behind.

"Well that looks nice" I said.

Felicia shrugged. "S'OK" she said. "Tights are itchy as fuck though." She grabbed a handful of one of the legs of her tights and wrenched it around.

There wasn't really a good response to that, but Pam came bursting in to inform me about the scorch mark Amelia had left on the vanity of the bathroom in their unit, so I went to investigate that and found Amelia rapidly wiping at it with a towel.

"I didn't mean to!" she said. "But they're so hot, and I just…"

I peered at the mark. It was one of many. "I think we'll be fine, we'll just tell the owners when we leave and see what they say."

"Will Dad be pissed off?" Amelia asked.

"Um…no, I think he'll be OK. Worse things happen at sea." Worse things happened in our house on a regular basis.

"Stupid hair-straighteners" Amelia muttered.

"Can I have my hair straightened?" Pam said hopefully.

"Pam, you hair is straight" I reminded her.

"Oh" she said, sadly.

"Maybe I could do those curl things though? Like Kennedy did with the straighteners?" Amelia mused.

"Like curling tongs?" I asked, and Amelia nodded. "Well, have a go" I said to her, "But try not to scorch Pam. Daddy might not be so forgiving about that one."

"OK" Amelia said. "Pam, come here, and for God's sake you have to stand still! I don't want to burn you!" Pam gave me a slightly worried look, but did as Amelia told her to and I left again, only to find that in our unit war seemed to have broken out between Felicia and Sam over who had control of the TV remote.

"Go back to your room!" Sam shouted at Felicia who was standing on the couch holding the remote above her head.

"No!" she shouted back. "This is the family room; I get to be here too!"

"Felicia, just go back next door where there is a free TV please" I said, and Felicia gave me a filthy look. Sam's look of pure triumph faded though when I said "And Sam, go and get changed!"

Sam disappeared into the bedroom, where I heard him yell "That's my shirt!" to Tray, and Felicia climbed down off the couch. "Where's Dad?" I asked her.

"Having a shower" she replied, as she dropped the remote on the couch and walked out.

Oh bugger. Yeah, he hadn't bothered showering at home before we left. Trust Eric to bloody hog the bathroom. There was nothing for it, we'd have to share.

I tried the door and was pleased to find that he'd at least not locked me out, and then I walked into the room, trying to peer through the amount of steam that had built up.

"Oh" I said. "That's a bit odd." Eric turned around and frowned at me. What I hadn't noticed up until now, probably because I could never get near the bathroom, was that the spa bath, which took up nearly a third of the room, didn't have any kind of doors or shower curtain around it. So the shower over it, which Eric was currently using, was completely exposed, leaving Eric standing in a bath practically in the middle of the bathroom.

"What's odd?" Eric asked, grumpily.

"The shower…or bath. Or whatever" I said, moving over to the vanity to start putting makeup on. Well, I moved in that direction, but I have to admit to keeping my eyes on Eric for a moment or two. He was kind of obvious where he was, standing in that bath, and the fact that the bath was quite a bit higher than the floor meant that…well, bits of Eric were a lot higher than they'd normally be.

And I'd been perved at a lot over the years. It was only fair to return the favour occasionally.

Of course when I actually turned to look at the mirror, I realised that it was going to be a bit hopeless as the steam had completely clouded it up anyway. I wiped at it with a towel, but it was a losing battle, so I opened the window a crack thinking that might help. It didn't help Eric though.

"Fuck!" he yelled. "That's fucking cold air, Sookie." I sighed, and closed the window again. Mostly so the rest of the people at the motel didn't have to hear the language coming from our unit.

I did the best I could with my makeup, although getting it to adhere to skin that's damp from steam wasn't brilliant. I was just about to try to work out what to do with my rapidly wilting and frizzing hair when Tray burst in to use the loo.

"You're still not dressed" I reminded him.

"What? Oh" he said, as he washed his hands and walked out. I really wasn't sure what that 'oh' meant.

I went back to my hair, only now Eric had finished in the shower and I was stuck sharing the mirror with him. It wasn't a big mirror and I kept getting pushed aside by Eric's elbows. I didn't think he really meant to do it to me, well I hoped he didn't, but in the end I gave up went to the bedroom where I made a half-hearted attempt at pinning my hair up. I wasn't great at hair, anything beyond a ponytail and I was mostly stuffed.

I quickly stripped out of the clothes I'd travelled up in and put on a fresh bra, some tights with a kind of lacy pattern, and some of those knickers that aren't that attractive but which are meant to suck your tummy in. After five kids my tummy was never going to be flat again.

Of course at this point, Eric, who had looked so good in the shower and who looked pretty good still clad only in his underpants, walked into the room and sized me up. I really wished I could hide, but there wasn't anywhere to go.

"I, uh…the stockings are good" Eric said.

"They're tights" I corrected.

"Mmm" Eric said, stepping a bit closer and running his hand up my thigh. Maybe he wasn't really looking at the big knickers I was wearing. "I like you in tights" he said. I was a bit worried that this was going to be one of those moments where Eric attached himself to me like a limpet and there wasn't much hope for me breaking away any time soon, but then there was a shout from Pam of "Want to see my hair?" and she burst into the bedroom. "Look!" she demanded, twirling around to see the waves Amelia had put in it.

"You look lovely, Pam" Eric said.

"I know!" she said and then she practically pushed Eric and me out of the way to get the mirror on the dressing table to admire herself further. Pam had a brand-new dress to wear; it was deep-pink velvet with tiny sparkles on the bodice and a matching bolero jacket. I'd seen it on sale at Farmer's and it had bought me at least one afternoon's worth of gratitude and hero-worship from Pam who fell in love with it at first sight. We'd paired it with some white tights and her good shoes and she looked like a little girl in a storybook. At least that's what Pam thought she looked like. Felicia told her she still looked like a freaky albino kid, but it didn't seem to bother Pam.

I left Pam twirling from side to side, and put my own dress on. It had been a lot harder to find than Pam's, mainly because I'd been adamant about having a dress with sleeves and they're less common than you would think. The one I'd finally bought was nice, it was a dark rust colour in an odd kind of nylon fabric that I was assured was ethical, and it had a V-neck, a sash at the waist and a skirt that ballooned out slightly to fall to my knees. Over it I had a black jacket with one button at the waist and a slight peplum to wear as I wasn't sure how cold it was going to be standing outside for the ceremony.

Eric had his suit, and the one remaining tie. Only, apparently, it was the wrong tie. "Where's my other tie?" he said, peering into his suit-bag.

"Um…that was the one I lent Jason" I said to him.

"Jason?" Eric asked. "Why the fuck has Jason got my tie?"

"I called out to you. He forgot his…or doesn't own one…something like that, anyway. So he borrowed one. Off you."

"I don't fucking see how he can have borrowed it off me, when I didn't give it to him" Eric grumbled, as he put on his shirt and started buttoning it up.

"Do you think I look older?" Pam asked.

"Oh for fuck's sake. No, Pam. You do not look older" Eric said to her.

Pam sighed. That wasn't the correct answer to that question. "I think I look eight" she said. "Mummy. Do I look like I'm eight?"

"Maybe" I agreed, and Eric muttered loudly in the background about being happy with the age you were and not wishing your life away.

Amelia came in to show me her dress next. Well, actually it was my dress. She'd begged and pleaded and in the end I'd caved and said that yes, she could wear my purple wrap dress, but no, she couldn't wear any high heels with it.

And as I looked at her now I realised it was a sad day when your daughter could not only wear your clothes, but she also might look slightly better in them.

"Wow" I said to her. "You look, uh…great. Really grown-up"

"I do look older, don't I?" Amelia agreed.

"And me!" Pam added.

"Oh for fuck's sake, nobody _needs_ to look older!" Eric half-shouted from the other side of the bed where he was currently trying to get his shoes on.

"Mum, your hair's wonky" Amelia pointed out.

"Oh, crap" I said, crouching down to see better in the dressing-table mirror.

"I'll re-do it" Amelia said, and she made me sit on the bed, while she knelt on it behind me and she twisted it up again. Pam hovered and handed her hairpins and tried to be helpful. Eric came over to stand beside us all and check out how his pants fitted in the mirror. "They look good" I assured him, but he looked at me weirdly. Well, he'd been checking out his bum, I was just trying to be helpful.

When Amelia was finished we all went out to find Sam and Tray had finally dressed themselves. I hadn't even entertained the idea of wrangling them into ties at all, but we'd gone with shirts and waistcoats and as I watched them trying to wrestle on the couch and contemplated how soon it would have taken one of them to strangle the other with a tie, I was kind of glad of it.

"OK, shoes on Tray. Let's get this show on the road" I said.

EPOV

I wasn't looking forward to the wedding. For one thing, it was being held in a vineyard. I knew shit all about wine making other than that the vines were important. I got the impression that a bunch of kids in a vineyard were just going to be trouble.

I was pretty damn right about that.

For one thing, the fucking tractor left parked near the patio where they served cocktails before the ceremony was a magnet to Tray who wanted to climb all over it. And possibly see if he could get it to work.

"He can't do much with it" Jason commented. "It's just a shitty old thing, eh?"

"Yeah, but if he fucking drives it straight onto the patio it's going to make the bride a bit fucking annoyed" I pointed out.

"Oi! Tray!" Jason called, and then he put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Fucking loudly. Fuck. That was piercing. He gestured for Tray to get off.

"He's not a dog, Jason!" Sookie admonished. Jason shrugged. Tray actually looked in our direction, and reluctantly climbed off the tractor and went back to standing next to it, kicking the tyres and eyeing up the rows of grape vines. Fuck I hope the boys didn't decide that was a maze.

"I hope the weather holds" Sookie muttered, staring up at the sky.

"I think we might be lucky" Crystal agreed, looking up with the same intensity. I didn't quite get the constant worry about the weather. Sure no one wanted to be standing outside when it started to rain, but there were other things to worry about that were more pressing and immediate. Like where the fuck Sam and Tray had disappeared to now.

"They're over by the presents" Jason said, nodding in that direction when he saw me looking for them.

I really fucking hoped that no one had bought any glassware.

SPOV

The idea of getting married in a vineyard probably seems like a great one when you're contemplating your wedding, but the reality of trying to do it in autumn is a bit chilly to be honest. Of course it hadn't helped that Hunter and Jenny had moved the date forward from later in the year when it was originally scheduled. And I was one of the few who knew the whole story behind that. Jenny and Hunter had wanted to try for another baby before Ryder got too much older, Jenny had wanted to be married first, and then, I found out earlier today because Aunty Linda is a terrible gossip, they'd been trying anyway and she was about six week's pregnant right at that moment.

So it probably explained why she looked a bit green when she was walked up the makeshift aisle to a small bower created in amongst the grape vines. Aside from that she did look lovely though, and her dress really suited her, although my mother might have said a few things about her choosing white. My mother wasn't here to do it though, and I didn't feel like standing in for her and being uncharitable on Jenny's wedding day. So I'd go with the idea that she looked lovely, and they'd done a really good job of covering up her birthmark and leave it at that.

The marriage celebrant was standing at the front and there were a few white plastic chairs arranged in rows for guests to sit in. I'd had to haul the kids out of the chairs because really they were for adult guests and close family. We could stand at the back behind the chairs. Which meant that, hopefully, no one else would hear Tray whisper "Is it over yet?" really loudly just as the ceremony began.

It was a fairly standard ceremony, lots of promises to love each other for eternity. I wanted to pay more attention to it, I really did, but the kids were distracting me with their constant whispering and the fact the boys kept trying to sneak off, and even worse than that, I kept sinking into the slightly damp ground. High heels weren't a good idea and I just clutched Eric's arm and hoped I didn't tip over.

It was Ryder I really felt sorry for. Hadley had walked him up the aisle and he was technically the page boy, but mostly he just wanted his mum to pick him up and she couldn't really while she was getting a ring put on her finger.

Yeah, the beach had worked out a lot better. At least Felicia had been able to dig in the sand, even if she had half-covered Eric in the process.

EPOV

The ceremony was like any other; boring as shit. I didn't even really know these people so I didn't particularly care what they said to each other in their vows. Mostly I cared about whether the kids would run off, or whether it was a long time until dinner. Sookie cared though; she was kind of clutching my arm and leaning into me which was nice. Probably she was remembering our wedding…or civil whatever-the-fuck it was. That had been a nice wedding. And the beach was a much nicer place to have it, not this windy fucking hillside surrounded by grape vines and a fucking tractor.

I hoped it was over soon.

SPOV

They handed around rose petals to throw at Jenny and Hunter as the ceremony finished, and Pam and Ngaihuia bonded over that. I was a bit worried that Sam and Tray were going to see petal-throwing as some kind of competitive sport, but when I looked around, I couldn't see them.

I heard a shout though, that sounded vaguely familiar. Felicia walked over from where she'd been standing. "Tray fell off the tractor" she said. "Well…possibly he was pushed." She shrugged and wrapped her cardigan around herself.

Amelia who had opted not to wear a jacket or cardigan as she thought it would spoil the look of the dress, shivered next to her.

"Can you go and check they're behaving?" I said to Eric, and instantly regretted it when he did just that and I was left without anyone to lean on. I looked at Jason, but decided against it. He might have been nearly 47 but I still didn't trust him not to push me over and leave me on the ground if I let him know how unsteady I was at the moment.

Old habits die hard, after all.

Eric was back pretty quickly though. "Is he OK?" I asked, as we followed the rest of the guests down the slope that led to the patio we'd been standing on before.

"Yep" Eric said. "It was a bit of a fall, but he's fine."

"Did he hurt himself?" I asked.

"He's fine, Sookie" Eric reiterated, as though I was being a bit thick.

I sighed. Eric would suck at triage because the Eric Northman injury scale seemed to have two levels; fine, and dead. Since no one in our house had ever managed to achieve the latter, and not from lack of trying I sometimes thought, I fully expected to one day find one of the kids missing a limb or bleeding from an artery just after their father had pronounced them to be 'fine'.

And it turned out that Tray was fine, I guess the soft ground had broken his fall, although the sleeve of his white shirt was now pretty muddy.

So when we got called over for the group photo of all the guests, we had to make sure Tray's arm was hidden by Sam, which wasn't much fun for Sam as it gave Tray the perfect opportunity to get a decent amount of poking in while everyone's eyes were facing forward, although I couldn't be certain that when the photos came through there wouldn't be the odd shot which showed Eric turning around and admonishing Tray.

And then they took family group shots. Eric looked a bit horrified that he had to be included in the Stackhouse one. I didn't know why he thought he should get a free pass, and it really wasn't my fault that he ended up standing next to Aunty Linda who clung onto his arm in the same way I had been earlier. Even though we were on paving stones now, and she wasn't exactly that old and frail.

After we'd been in the requisite photos, we could head inside and out of the wind for the drinks. And the hors d'oeuvres, which I had to remind Tray, did not get eaten in handfuls. "But Mum!" he said, with his mouth full, "They're just little! And they keep offering them to me!"

"Still doesn't work like that" I said, turning a blind eye to the fact Eric was loading himself up from another server's tray. "There's not much food" he grumbled.

"Well, it's not dinner" I pointed out, and I handed him a glass of the sparkling wine I'd taken from another waiter. "Try the bubbles" I said to him. "They're really good." There had to be some advantages to holding the wedding in a vineyard, after all.

Pam overheard that one though. "Bubbles?" she asked. "There's going to be bubbles?"

"Mum means the wine" Felicia told her.

"Oh" Pam said sadly.

"We had bubbles though" Amelia mused. "When Mum and Eric got married. There were bubbles. Proper bubbles. They were fun."

"I wasn't there" Pam said grumpily. She didn't like to be told about the stuff that had happened before she was born and the wedding was a real sticking point.

"No" Amelia agreed. "It was just me."

"And me!" Felicia interjected. "You always forget me."

"Yeah. I guess you were there" Amelia said, not sounding convinced. I got the feeling she missed the days when Felicia had been a toddler and pretty easy to just blank. "I'm going to see what table we're at" Amelia said, and she drifted off before I could tell her it was a while until dinner was being served.

"When's dinner?" Felicia asked. Honestly, it was like being at home. I wasn't even in charge of this meal.

"A while" I said, hoping that would buy everyone off. Amelia came stomping back. "I'm at the kids' table!" she moaned.

"Are you?" I asked.

"Yes! I have to sit with, with…this lot" she swept an arm past her brothers and sisters. "And I'm not a kid!"

"Mmm" I said, trying to keep out of that one. I wasn't in charge of the seating arrangements here, either. Amelia turned from me to Eric but he was far less interested in her and way more interested in catching the eye of the waitress with the tray of little toast things on. But she got waylaid by Tony's family and never came our way.

"So none of you are sitting with us?" I asked Amelia.

"No!" she complained. "We have to sit together, at a kids' table. With other kids. How old's Tama? Because I think I'm older than him. I shouldn't be at that table." She folded her arms in front of her and looked stern.

"No…I'm pretty sure Tama's older than you" I said, but it didn't cheer Amelia up. Pam came skipping over holding hands with Ngaihuia. "We're sitting together!" Pam sing-songed. "Ngaihuia and me are sitting next to each other. Well, we weren't, but now we are."

"Did you swap the name-tags on the place-settings over?" I asked her.

"Yeah! It was boy-girl-boy and that's just dumb. I didn't want to sit next to Tray. I want to sit next to Ngaihuia!"

"We're friends now" Ngaihuia confirmed.

"She likes my dress" Pam added. It was nice their friendship was based on something other than being the two youngest girls in the family. They skipped off again and Aunty Linda came over and managed to catch Sam and Tray unawares as they were busy trying to unload food from another server at the time.

"Oh, haven't you boys grown!" she exclaimed, trying to hug Sam who looked less than enthused. Tray looked like he might bolt, but his escape was blocked by Eric, who'd moved in to take his share of the nibbles and possibly put his children between himself and Aunty Linda.

Aunty Linda moved on to Tray who held out his arm like a talisman. "I'm muddy" he said, but, unfortunately, with his mouth full it was kind of muffled and Aunty Linda didn't hear, or at least pretended not to. He got hugged as well.

"It makes me feel a bit sad, love" Aunty Linda said to me. "Doesn't seem that long since Hunter was just a little bloke and now look at him. He's all grown up with kids of his own…although you're not supposed to know about the other one of course." She gave me a significant look and I wondered just how quietly she thought she was talking, because she wasn't being quiet. I half-expected her to yell to Uncle Trev "That's right, Jenny's pregnant, isn't she Trev?"

Thankfully she didn't, so I just nodded, and she carried on. "They'll grow up before you know it, Sookie love."

"I am grown up" Amelia said. "But I'm at the baby table." She looked at Aunty Linda, probably expecting sympathy, but that wasn't the way Aunty Linda rolled. Aunty Linda was still busy lamenting the passage of time in Aunty Linda's life. "Doesn't seem that long since I had a teenage girl" she sighed. "Although she was a handful. I wouldn't do that again. Boys are much easier. You'll find out, love."

I nodded politely, and Aunty Linda lost interest in us. "I might just go and take Ryder off Hadley" she said, "Poor little thing, it's a big day for him." She trotted off to tussle with Hadley over Ryder who was still looking a bit bewildered by what was happening and I wasn't sure that watching Tray and Sam try to put each other in headlocks was really helping him cope with the day. The big boys seem a bit scary when you're little.

"How long until we get fed?" Eric asked.

"I have no bloody idea" I said to him. "But I hope it's soon."

"And we're not sitting with the kids?" he asked. "At all?"

"Apparently not. I guess we're at a grown-up table."

I looked at Eric and he looked at me. "Well, that'll be nice" he said. "We can just pretend it's us here, and we're not in charge of a bunch of savages." Eric and I clinked our glasses together and pretended we couldn't see Sam, Tray and Felicia chasing each other round the room and nearly knock one of Tony's aunts over in the process. Sometimes it was just better not to look.

**A/N If you want to see the vineyard where the wedding is being held, check out www (dot) ascensionwine (dot) co (dot) nz.**

**Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!**


	20. Chapter 20

**A/N Well, it's New Year's Eve here. It's also about the third day in a row we've all been house-bound due to the heavy rain. It's a joy. I'm off to drown my sorrows...**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. Hic!**

EPOV

Sometimes it was just better not to look. That was the decision I made when we were all seated for dinner and I realised I had a clear view of the table that all our children were seated at. Between the pushing and shoving and arguing over who was supposed to sit where it didn't look like a fun spot to be in. Luckily the other people seated at that table, Ngaihuia, Aroha and Tama seemed fine with joining in and were throwing the odd shove around as well.

I decided to look around our table instead. We seemed to be at the Stackhouse table which was…interesting. I had Aunty Linda on the other side of me, and then Uncle Trev, a highchair for Hunter's kid, Hadley, Hadley's scary but mostly silent partner whose name escaped me, Crystal, Jason and then Sookie.

There was less pushing and shoving, but I wasn't sure it was that much more civilised. Jason was throwing back his drinks and Hadley and Aunty Linda were involved in an on-going dispute about what the baby should be eating and when and whether he should be drinking milk or water. At least that kept Aunty Linda's attention off me. Uncle Trev was caught in the middle of the argument, but it didn't seem to bother him, as he was currently looking through Aunty Linda's handbag for his reading glasses and piling up crumpled tissues, packets of artificial sweetener and cigarettes on the table in front of him. Hadley's partner who wasn't a Trev, but whose name maybe started with T as well…or G, possibly. Was he Gary? I couldn't remember. Anyway, he just smiled benevolently at us all and I got the impression he didn't have a fucking clue what was going on. Or give a fuck. And Crystal and Jason were having a quiet, but definitely not silent, argument, over who was the designated driver which I guessed was the reason for Jason drinking with such determination. If he got enough drinks down him, the argument would be over.

Fuck, maybe the kids weren't so bad after all.

SPOV

I was really feeling sorry for Ryder by the time we all sat down to dinner. In the other room where they had the drinks he'd been running around and doing his own thing, but now he was stuck in a highchair between Hadley and Aunty Linda. Well, technically Uncle Trev was between them, but Ryder was next to him and they were arguing over him like there was no tomorrow. I wondered if it was possible that there were too many generations in their family.

One of Hunter's friends who was acting as the Master of Ceremonies announced that we'd be called up table by table to the buffet, and then sat down again. "Surely we'll go first" Aunty Linda said, "Because we're family. And because of wee Ryder. He needs to eat."

Ryder looked a bit mournful and went back to pushing a toy car around the tray of the highchair he was sitting in.

"Well…I think so" Hadley said. "I mean, I did ask…but then, there's the other table over there with Jenny's parents…" she glared a little bit at Jenny's mother, who seemed a perfectly nice woman.

"But we have Ryder" Aunty Linda said again. "So that makes a difference." She made it sound as though she and Hadley had won some great prize. I really felt sorry for Ryder now.

Hadley shrugged. "It's up to the maître d'. See that guy over there? The one with the…hair, and stuff…" Hadley trailed off.

"The fairy-looking one?" Aunty Linda asked. OK, tact was not her strong suit.

"Well…I don't know what he is…" Hadley said.

"He's fuckin' gay, eh?" Jason interjected. "You can tell from a fuckin' mile away. All that flappin' his hands around and stuff."

"Oh, look! He's walking past us, try and get his attention" Aunty Linda said, gazing at the poor guy. He didn't look her way.

"Huh" she said. "Well I guess my charms are kind of wasted on him." She looked down at her cleavage and shook her head. And then she had an idea. "Eric! Eric, undo some buttons quickly, he's coming back!" She grabbed Eric's arm and poor Eric looked a bit shocked, but I wasn't sure what he was more shocked about, Aunty Linda's mad plan to get us fed earlier through the sexual enticement of the maître d', or the fact that she wanted to involve him in it.

Actually, I realised, as my stomach rumbled loudly, I might be inclined to throw Eric at the guy if it would get us to the food any quicker.

"Um…" Eric said, "Not sure that'll work."

"Course it will, love" Aunty Linda said, never moving her hand off Eric's arm. "It's no good trying to get him to think Trev's interested. That'd get us moved down the queue, not further up. Right, Trev!"

"He's not my bloody type!" Uncle Trev said, laughing.

"Yeah, and you're not his. No, our best bet's Eric. Come on" Aunty Linda urged, while Eric tried to stare her down. I could have told him that that kind of stuff doesn't work with Aunty Linda.

But I might have been enjoying watching him figure it out on his own.

"Oh, fuck it; I'm fuckin' starvin', eh?" Jason said, turning round in his seat to watch the poor maître d' who was still walking around talking to serving staff and arranging things so they could start serving the food. Jason pulled off the tie I'd lent him and shoved it in my direction, and then undid some of the buttons on his shirt, before lounging back in his chair and winking at the maître d' when he walked past again. The poor guy did at least smile back at Jason.

"Right" Jason said, clapping his hands together. "I think we're fuckin' in there, eh?"

"Good work, eh bro" Tony said, laughing.

Aunty Linda laughed so hard that she nearly fell off her chair, so it was a good thing she was still holding on to Eric's arm. Hadley was laughing too, and Crystal took the opportunity to grab Jason's beer while he was busy basking in the admiration of his aunt and cousin, and she downed the remainder in one gulp.

Jason turned and gave Crystal a filthy look just as she was putting the glass back on the table. "Fuck, woman!" he said, and she giggled. "There I am fuckin' puttin' myself out there so you can get fed, and you steal my fuckin' beer. There's no pleasing…" He trailed off as the maître d' came into view again and gave the poor guy another nod and wink. The maître d' was starting to look at Jason slightly suspiciously now.

"Fuckin' hell" Jason said. "If that doesn't work, then fuck it, Eric, you'll have to take over, eh? I'm obviously losing my touch."

"Maybe he doesn't like blond guys, though?" Hadley mused, taking it all a bit seriously.

"I don't think his type are that fussy, eh?" Jason said, looking mournfully at his empty beer glass.

I was going to ask him what the poor guy's type was and how Jason knew all about it, but Ngaihuia came over and plonked herself in Jason's lap.

"What's up, Bubs?" Crystal asked, but Ngaihuia turned her attention to Jason.

"Daddy!" she said. "Pam's bein' all bossy!"

Jason shrugged. "I doubt she can help it, eh?" he said. "Her mother's kinda bossy at the best of times." He jerked a thumb towards me and Ngaihuia laughed.

Eric sniggered, but I ignored him. He was still in Aunty Linda's clutches anyway, so that was punishment enough.

"Oi!" I said to Jason. "That's not true and you know it."

"Nah" he said. "It is. All you little sisters are the same. Think you rule the bloody world" he rolled his eyes dramatically and Ngaihuia laughed again.

"Oh, you!" I said to Jason. "Your childhood was _not_ that bad, you know."

"Oh, it was" Jason said. "But what choice did I bloody have? Mrs Fortenberry kept bringing her back home when I left her there, eh?"

Pam came over to us at that point. "You have to come back" she said to Ngaihuia. Ngaihuia didn't look enthused. Pam tried again. "Because now the boys think they're in charge and they're all being stupid. Tray's gone under the table."

Ngaihuia looked marginally interested and Pam pressed on. "And Tama tried to eat your chocolates, but I told him no, he couldn't eat them and Felicia told me to mind my own business and I don't like any of them, apart from you. You can see my Barbies later on. I had to leave them in the motel, but they're getting married."

"Are they?" Ngaihuia asked.

"Yeah. There's a dress and everything."

Next to me Eric muttered "And yet there isn't a fucking groom", but it was under his breath so Pam didn't catch it. Or care. Probably the latter.

"OK" Ngaihuia said, and they left together.

"I wish it was always like that" I mused. "You fall out and then five minutes later you're best friends again ready to take on the world."

"I know" Crystal said. "And then it just gets bloody harder as they get older. That's what I hate about living in a small place, eh? All the kids just bloody gang up on each other."

"Yeah" I said. "Although I don't know that it's better where we are."

Amelia stomped over. "Can you tell them that I'm in charge? Well, tell Leesha anyway?" She looked expectantly at Eric.

"I think that would defeat the purpose of you being in charge, Ames" he said, which made Amelia roll her eyes and stomp off. I could hear her calling out "You're _not_ the boss, Leesh!" but I doubted it would do her any good.

"Christ, how long until we get fed?" Jason wondered, looking around for the maître d' who was now nowhere to be seen.

Felicia came bounding over next and stood beside Eric, frowning a bit at Aunty Linda, who seemed oblivious. "Sam and Tray ate all their chocolates" she announced.

"Well, that's to be expected" I said. It was all very well putting out little boxes of chocolates for the guests but kids were going to snaffle them up.

"Yeah, then they were burning the wrappers in the candles. Tama was too" Felicia reported. OK, well that wasn't so good. I didn't really want to be the mother of the kids who burned down a reception room.

"But they've stopped now" Felicia continued. "I blew out the candles!"

"Oh, well. Thanks" I said.

"Good thinking, Leesh" Eric added.

"Oh" she said, looking surprised. "Oh. OK." I got the impression she maybe hadn't blown out the flames to avert disaster as much as she had to just annoy her brothers and ruin their game.

"I'm going to eat my chocolates now" Felicia announced. "Sam and Tray are gonna be bummed!" And then she left again to go and join the table that was thankfully no longer in danger of burning to the ground before dinner was served.

And I wondered when that was going to be because I was starting to really feel a bit peckish now. Sure the hors d'oeuvres had been travelling around quite regularly, but every time they'd got near me they'd been snaffled up by the other members of the family.

I was busy gazing at the big stained glass window behind the top table, trying to work out what it depicted and I didn't see the maître d' come over to our table. Neither did Eric, I'd guess, because one minute he wasn't there, and the next minute he was, leaning right over Eric with one hand on Eric's shoulder. "If you'd like to follow me" the maître d' said to Eric, rather than to the table at large, "I'll show you to the buffet."

"Sure" Eric said, and the maître d' gave him a smile and walked off. Eric stood and waited for me, and Aunty Linda nearly fell off her chair laughing. As Eric and I walked to the area where the buffet was set up I could hear Jason grumbling to Crystal. "I don't know what's so fuckin' special about Eric" Jason said. "I mean, he fuckin' smiled at me before…" I didn't bother listening to any more of Jason's speech. Sod it. Jason and Eric could fight over the maître d', I was more worried about the food.

So, apparently, was Tray who appeared at my side just as I was reaching for a plate. "Hello" Eric said to him.

"Um…hi" he said, surveying the food on offer.

"You have to sit down" Eric said. "Your table hasn't been called yet."

"Called?" Tray asked. "But it's dinnertime."

"You come up one table at a time" I said to him. "That's how it works."

"But…you guys are up here" Tray said.

"Mmm-hmm" I agreed. "Our table got called up to eat." The table with Jenny's family were now joining the queue and we needed to get moving.

"I haven't got anything to eat" Tray said, and then he looked at me pleadingly, as if trying to remind me that it was in my job description to make sure he was fed on a regular basis. I toyed with the idea of handing him a bread roll and sending him back to his seat, but I knew if Tray turned up back there with food there'd be a stampede as they all mobbed us.

"You'll enjoy it more after a bit of anticipation" Eric said to Tray, as he helped himself to a bread roll, and then several spoonfuls of the pasta salad.

"What?" Tray asked, his eyes fixed on the food on Eric's plate.

"Go back to your seat and wait your turn" Eric said. Tray gave up and left us to make our selections.

We'd just sat back down when Pam came over looking upset. "They ate my chocolates!" she wailed. "I was saving them, and Tray and Sam ate them!" Her little lip wobbled as she looked at us with big, blue eyes.

"Here you go, have mine" I said, handing my box of chocolates over to Pam.

"Thanks, Mummy!" she said, having instantly recovered her good mood, and she skipped off.

Jason came and sat back down with a plate heaped with food. "Jesus, Jason!" I exclaimed. "Did you leave any for other people?"

"It's just what they put on my plate, eh Sook" Jason replied.

"Not the ham, just…everything else. The pile of potatoes for one thing."

"Did Uncle Jason eat all the potatoes?" Tray asked worriedly from behind me.

"No!" I said.

"But…but…Dad's got a heap too. There won't be any left!"

"Yes there will Tray" Eric said, while casting a glance at Jason's pile of potatoes. "Now did you actually want anything?"

"Oh. Yeah. Pam's got chocolates" he said.

"Well…everyone has chocolates" Eric replied, as Tray edged closer to Eric's food and Eric had to spread his elbow wider to keep Tray away from it, knocking into my elbow in the process.

"Yeah…but Pam got new chocolates. From here. She showed us all. So…can I have some?" he asked.

"Didn't you eat Pam's?" Eric asked him.

"No!" Tray said, totally affronted. "No. I didn't eat Pam's. Sam ate Pam's, I ate some of Amelia's."

"Just go and sit down" Eric said, taking a mouthful of his own potato. "Before you miss out on being called up for dinner."

That made Tray look a bit worried. "Oh, OK. Yeah" he said, and he started to walk off. As he did though, Jason called out "Oi! Tray, mate!" and threw him a potato, which Tray caught. "Cheers Uncle Jase" he said, and he ran off with his prize.

"Jason! He's still not a dog. Don't give him table scraps either" I said, but Jason just shrugged and Eric carried on eating.

Hadley and Aunty Linda were fussing over poor Ryder who didn't really seem to want anything. Mostly he wanted his mother, but she was eating at the top table and probably enjoying having a sit-down for the first time today. More than anything, I thought, Hadley and Aunty Linda were just reluctant to admit defeat with their grandson and great-grandson and no way were they going to give him back before they really had to.

"I'll just give him a bit of this ham, love" Aunty Linda said.

"No, Mum" Hadley said, sounding totally exasperated. "He doesn't really like ham. I've given him some chicken and I'll just cut up this potato."

Ryder looked unimpressed with any of it and just threw his sipper cup on the floor where the lid came off and it made a puddle on the carpet which he admired from his vantage point.

"Trev! Trev, give us your napkin" Aunty Linda said, as she knelt down to mop it up.

Sam came over. "It's noisy at our table" he commented.

"I'm sure it is" Eric agreed.

"Is the food nice?" he asked.

"Yes" Eric confirmed, putting the last mouthful of his on his fork.

"Yeah, not bad" I said, as I swallowed some of the chicken. "I mean…it's a buffet, so you know." I shrugged. I wasn't a fan of buffet food. Sam nodded in sympathy, but then I caught Hadley's eye. Oh crap. Yeah. Her son's wedding. Shut up Sookie and don't say anything else. "The wine's very good though" I said, hurriedly. "You'd expect that in a vineyard, but the pinot gris is yummy."

Sam looked interested. "Can I try?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know" I said. It probably wasn't a good look.

"I had some of Uncle Jase's beer earlier" he said. "I didn't like that."

I turned to look at Jason, but he had his head down over his plate. He was hopeless. "Fine" I said. "Have a sip."

Sam took a sip and pulled a face. "Yuck!" he said, and then his head whipped around. "Ooh. They're going up" and he ran across the room to join his siblings in the queue for food.

"You better go up there" I said to Eric.

"What? I don't think I can get seconds yet" he said, and Jason's head popped up, looking interested.

"No. To deliver the speech. And just, you know, watch the boys…and their portions." The speech was well-known in our house, it was the same speech we had to give before we ever went into one of the Baker's Delight bread shops; those trays of free samples they had out on the counter could be decimated in a few seconds if the kids really got into them. They needed to be reminded, each and every time, that the freebies were for everyone. I didn't think a buffet would be any different.

"OK" Eric said, putting his napkin on the table and standing up. "I'm on it."

"Tell Tama too, eh mate?" Jason said, as Eric walked past.

EPOV

I got to the queue for food and tried to ignore the amount of pushing and shoving that the kids were doing. "OK" I said, mostly addressing the kids that were mine but aware that some of the others were listening. "Just take what you need and leave some for everyone else."

"I think we're the last table" Amelia pointed out. "So it's OK."

"So, what's OK?"

"If we take it all" she said, shrugging and then picking up a plate. "Ooh, prawns."

"No, that's not how it works. You don't take more than you need" I said.

"But I'm hungry!" Tray whined. "I need a lot!"

"Me too, eh?" Tama added.

"Hungry is fine, greedy misses out on fucking dessert" I warned. And then I noticed Sam and Tray. "For fuck's sake guys, put those down. No, on your plates, not back on the fucking platter." They'd picked up a prawn each and had been making them fight each other.

Tray pulled a face. "I don't like prawns" he mumbled.

"Well don't fucking play with the food if you're not going to eat it" I said. "Give it to Amelia."

"I don't want used prawns!" she cried. "He's filthy. I don't want to eat anything he touched." Tray gave his sister a big grin to show just how much he cared about her assessment of the cleanliness of his hands. And then he picked up another prawn off the platter.

"Tray! You just said you didn't like prawns." I said to him.

"Yeah…but they look cool" he said. "You know, 'cos you can see their eyes, and their claws and stuff. Rar!" He held one up and waved it at Pam, who took a step back and nearly collided with Ngaihuia. 'You're gross and stinky" she said, and Ngaihuia seemed to second that assessment.

"And you get to pull the heads off" Sam added, loading up his own plate.

"OK, well, if you take it, make sure you eat it" I said, "And if I hear about any prawn fighting rings going on, there will be fucking consequences, I can tell you that right now." I glared at Tray who looked down. Tama nudged Sam and said "Your dad's fuckin' funny, eh?" and then I left them to it, not looking back although I could hear Sam loudly saying "Not _that_ many potatoes, Tray!"

When I got back to the table Sookie was deep in conversation with Crystal. Mostly it seemed to be about what was going with on with Amelia, and Crystal was sharing her own stories about Aroha. Yeah, that was kind of boring. I sat back down and took a large sip of the wine. Sookie was right, it was pretty good. Still, I thought overall our wedding had been better.

I looked over at the little kid in the highchair. Fuck, he looked bored too. I tried to picture what Felicia had been like at our wedding…she must have been the same age? I couldn't really remember. But I remembered she hadn't sat down the whole evening. This kid was strapped in tightly and being fought over by two grandmothers. Fuck, he was in for a shitty night.

I looked over at Felicia who wasn't sitting down now, either, but was standing up to get better leverage for punching Sam. Yeah, fuck it. I wasn't going to look at that. I'd go back to contemplating the wineglass.

And then they announced that speeches were up next, so I figured even dessert would be a way off. Fucking fantastic. I just wanted to get out of here really. I had hopes about that huge bathtub and Sookie and maybe all of the kids actually fucking sleeping like the dead for once. It could happen. There was always hope.

I looked back over at the kid's table.

Even if that hope was a vain one.

**Thanks for reading and I hope you all have a fantastic New Year's!**


	21. Chapter 21

**A/N OK, so my toddler is two now and getting harder to entertain. You can't play Eye Spy with someone who thinks the game is Eye Spider, thinks the answer to every clue is her favourite uncle's name, or kangaroo, and who shouts "My turn!" whenever someone else tries to have a turn. We realised we might in trouble with her the morning I found her on the dining room table throwing the contents of her sister's craft box at said sister. But it's worth it to watch her do air-drums as she dances. That's very cute!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

"Do you want to go and tell them they'll have to behave during the speeches?" Sookie asked me, and I wasn't really sure that what she was looking for was the truth, because I didn't want to go over to the kids table at all. I wanted to stay where I was and pretend they weren't anything to do with me. Especially the ones who were currently under the table trying to grab people's feet.

But telling Sookie how I actually felt about our kids at that moment in time wasn't going to persuade her that later on she should ignore said kids and get in the bath with me. No, I was going to have to go over there, and deliver yet another lecture.

Except that when I got there, the table was mostly empty. Except for the litter of discarded prawns and prawn heads. "Where'd they all go?" I asked Amelia.

She shrugged. "Dunno" she said. "Ow! Pam, get out from under there!" Pam emerged from the table and giggled, followed closely by Ngaihuia. Well that was where two of them were.

Felicia arrived and flopped in her seat. "There's no dessert yet!" she complained. "Mum said there'd be dessert afterwards and there isn't."

"Well, no" I said "There are speeches first…that's what I came to say…" But no one was listening.

"Well that's boring!" Felicia huffed, while Amelia just said over the top of her "I don't want dessert anyway. I'm too full!"

"That's because you ate all those prawns" Felicia accused. "And how did you do that anyway? They have faces! Look, here's one of their faces…oh no that's a whole one. I think that was Tray's. But look! You can see its eyes. How is that different from a cow? How?"

Amelia shrugged. "Just is" she said, which made Felicia look more infuriated with her. I got the feeling this argument had been going on for a while and there wasn't much chance of a resolution in sight any time soon. I was fucked if I was getting dragged into it now.

"OK, so everyone else is…?" I asked.

"I'm here!" Pam said, waving a hand at me. "It's kind of boring though. Is the dancing soon? Mum said there'd be dancing." I sighed. Sookie seemed to be promising the kids a lot of things would be happening, but hadn't bothered telling them about the concept of speeches.

"There are speeches first so you have to sit quietly and listen…" Fuck, it might have been nice if Pam had fucking listened to me, but she'd decided I was being boring and started flicking the confetti that littered the table at Ngaihuia. That looked like something that Tray and Sam might have started, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me where they were.

And then they arrived back, along with Tama. They were all carrying large glasses, and Sam and Tray had one in each hand. "Look, Dad!" Tray said. "You can just ask that guy up there and he gives you all these drinks. For free!" And then he looked at me and looked thoughtful. "It is free, isn't it?"

Fuck. Tray and Sam had discovered the joy of an open bar. They set their drinks on the table and quickly sat down. "Yes" I said to Tray. "But do you really think you need two Cokes, Tray?" Fuck, he was never going to fucking go to sleep tonight after all of that.

"I might" he said, shrugging.

"One of mine's L&P" Sam pointed out. Yeah, that probably wasn't much better, from what I could tell it was all just fucking sugar. They both started slurping up their drinks, probably worried they'd be taken away at any moment. But then I made the mistake of glancing over at Tama, who'd been pretty quiet through all of this. Fuck, was that beer?

"Is that beer?" I asked him.

"Yeah" he said, defiantly. "But Jase said it was sweet, eh?" I looked at him, and thought fuck it. He wasn't my problem and what could happen at a wedding? Vomiting, possibly, and a hangover, but from the look of Jason and Crystal's drinking he wouldn't be the only one in the family.

"Beer's like, so gross" Amelia said to Tama.

"Oh, that's 'cos you're a chick. Chicks don't like beer, eh" Tama said to Amelia, which made her expression turn thunderous. "I'm _not_ a chick!" she said, pointing a finger at him. Felicia went one better and stood up and punched him in the arm. Hard enough to make him flinch. "Don't be a dick, Tama!" she warned, as she sat back down again.

It was nice to see Amelia and Felicia getting on.

"So, anyway. I just wanted to say…" I started, but I got interrupted by Aroha arriving back at the table. She sat down next to Felicia and immediately leaned over to talk to her. "So I asked Lita" she said, "And he is. Definitely."

"Oh" Felicia said, casting a dreamy glance at the top table. "Cool." OK, I decided I didn't want to even know what that was about. I tried again.

"There will be speeches next, so shut the fuck up and stay shut up while everyone else is talking, OK?" I said, and they all stared at me. There were some nods though, which I took as agreement. And then I went back to join Sookie and try to make it through the speeches myself.

They were pretty shit. They always were at these things. Sookie seemed to be listening attentively, but I kind of zoned out. I vaguely remembered that this was where the open bar always fucking proved useful and you could miss the boring bits of the night and go back to…shit, what did I used to do? Probably try to sleep with a bridesmaid. I looked at the bridesmaids. I couldn't remember why that was a good thing. I had a motel room with a large bath, and I had Sookie, and I just needed the speeches to finish so we could be closer to actually leaving and going back to the spa bath.

SPOV

While Eric was off talking to the kids and warning them about the speeches, Aunty Linda started saying how glad she was that Hunter and Jenny were 'finally' getting married. "I just don't get it, love" she said. "It's all the wrong way round these days." She gazed fondly at Ryder who, luckily, didn't realise just what she was implying about his heritage.

Hadley decided to take it as a dig though, and well she probably should. She'd marry Tony like a shot, at least, that was my take on it. But three kids later and he still didn't want to upset his very religious and Tongan mother by marrying a white girl and here they were, still a de facto couple and it didn't look like that was going to change anytime soon.

"Love doesn't mean a piece of bloody paper, Mum" Hadley said, tossing back her sparkling wine. "You should know that."

At least that made Aunty Linda look a bit chastened. In fact, when I looked around the table, none of my family could talk. There was Tony and Hadley still unmarried, and Jason and Crystal, who'd never married either, and didn't seem to feel the need to. Aunty Linda had had to get married to her first husband, as girls did in those days, but he'd barely stuck around long enough to see his daughter enter the world. Gran used to say that she'd love to run into him in a dark alley, and I had no doubt who'd come out of that encounter the best, but since then Aunty Linda had found a second chance with Uncle Trev in a union which hadn't been sealed by church or state. So, frankly, none of us could really talk.

Well, I could talk. I'd done it the right way round. Twice. So I could bloody talk. But I just wasn't going to.

Eric came back to the table at that point. "I think they're about to start" I said to him, but he didn't exactly look enthused.

The speeches were really good. Well, they were as good as you ever got at these things. Tony did a lovely speech, partly in Tongan I thought, about how he met Hunter as a young kid and all the things Hunter did to make him go away and how it hadn't worked yet, and how he was proud to be part of Hunter's life now that he'd turned out so well. Hadley and Aunty Linda both sniffed their way through that one.

Jenny made a speech, and my heart went out to her as she did it. She didn't seem like a natural public speaker and, although her voice was steady, if you looked closely you could see her hands were shaking as they clasped the piece of paper she had it written down on.

The best man's speech was the usual thing, lots of stories that alluded to Hunter having got up to all sorts of trouble, but never actually telling us any details.

And then finally Hunter got up to speak and even though he wasn't really mine, I was so proud of him. He was so grown-up now and he'd come such a long way from that sullen university student who worked on our house all those years ago. He spoke about how having Ryder was the best thing he'd ever done, and, as if on cue, Ryder, who'd abandoned Aunty Linda's lap in a rush to get to his dad, bowled up and said "Pick'p!" with his arms outstretched, so Hunter gave half his speech with Ryder on his hip playing with his tie-pin.

Hunter also talked about meeting Jenny and how he'd once been given the advice to 'just be yourself' and he'd kind of dismissed it as a load of greeting-card nonsense until he'd met Jenny, on his worst day working in London on a big commercial project for which she was part of the project team on the client's side, and how he'd been dripping with sweat from being stuck in the Central Line in the middle of summer, and late to a meeting and he'd been standing there swearing and looking for the revised blueprints he was supposed to have with him, when Jenny had asked if he'd wanted some water and he'd been so glad to hear another Kiwi that he'd nearly hugged her on the spot, but instead he settled for saying "fuck yes, and could you put fucking vodka in it". And later on he'd realised that all he wanted was to re-wind the clock and wish he could make a better impression. But she seemed to like him anyway, so that was all good. And when Hunter turned to look at Jenny as he said that last part, she looked all gooey and embarrassed and I thought they really did make such a nice couple. I was glad they had each other.

When the speeches and toasts were done I turned to Eric. "That was nice."

"What was?" he asked.

"Oh, well. All of it, really. But I did like Hunter's speech, and the points about how you had to be yourself and find the person who's happy with the real you."

Eric looked at me like I was talking nonsense. "That sounds a bit like a fucking greeting card, Sookie" he said. "Well that's what Hunter said! In his speech, but it turned out to be true. I wonder if that was something I told him? I remember he kept looking for advice, after he got dumped that time…remember? When he was working with Calvin? What was her name, anyway?"

Eric was now looking perplexed so I let the matter drop. Also, Hunter and Jenny were coming out to cut the wedding cake, so we had that to watch. And watch Tray and Sam scuttle past with some soft drinks. At least they'd found something to occupy them until dessert, I figured, but Eric frowned at them, and then it seemed to trigger something else, as he looked thoughtful, before leaning past me to talk to Jason. "Is Tama alright with beer?" he asked.

I looked at Jason as well. Tama was, if I was working it out correctly, almost 17 now. So probably old enough to have the odd beer around family, but I hoped it wasn't giving Sam and Tray ideas. I glanced over to check their glasses. They seemed to have Coke. I hope they stopped at the one glass.

I turned back to Jason to see him shrug and drink some more of his own beer. "He asked, and Dad used to let me at that age, eh? Remember Aunty Linda's 40th, Sook?"

I did. And the memories weren't pretty. "You got plastered at that party, Jase, because you didn't stop with the beer, you carried on with Uncle Trev's punch. The one with the Midori in it, remember?"

"Oh, shit. Yeah." Jason laughed to himself. "That Midori was fuckin' lethal. I totally blame Uncle Trev for that though, eh?"

"What are you blaming him for?" Hadley asked, coming back to the table after watching the cake-cutting close up. And probably stopping Ryder from barrelling into the table with the cake on it and knocking it over. He was getting a bit tired and hyper from the long day.

"Midori punch" I elaborated. "And the effects it had."

"Oh, shit yes" Hadley said with a shudder. "I told you about that, didn't I Tone?"

Tony nodded but didn't say anything. It surprised me how someone who was normally so completely silent could have turned out to be such a wonderful public speaker today. Maybe it was because of the church background? I didn't know.

And then something occurred to me. "That was nearly 30 years ago, Jase" I said. "Thirty bloody years. When did we get old enough to remember stuff from 30 years ago?"

Jason shrugged. "I'm not fuckin' old though, eh? I'm just a young joker." I looked at Jason properly for the first time in forever and I realised there was a certain amount of bravado in those words, and a certain amount of wrinkles around his eyes now. His hair had faded and he was just…well, fuck. He was about to be the same age Dad was when he died.

And I was almost the same age as Mum was. Oh, Christ on a cracker. We were old. Because although I was sad to lose my parents, and lose them when I was only twenty I never exactly thought of them as young people cut down in their prime, despite all their friends saying exactly that to me at the funeral. No, they were Mum and Dad and they weren't supposed to die, but they weren't supposed to be young either.

I turned to Eric. "I'm old!" I said, but Eric didn't say anything. Jason piped up in the background, "Too old for fuckin' Midori, anyway" and then laughed to himself again.

"I think maybe that was your problem" Hadley said to Jason. "You know, with that gay guy before…the one who works here. He probably doesn't like old guys."

"But I'm not fuckin' old!" Jason said, bristling. "And anyway, you're fuckin' older than me."

"By months, Jase" Hadley pointed out. "And I'm a grandmother."

"Yeah…fuck off" Jason said, waving his hand at Hadley.

"Suit yourself, but I think that's why he liked Eric. He's young still." She sat back in her chair, and muttered to herself, "Lucky bloody Sookie." I tried to feel offended, but fuck it, I decided. I might be an old bird, but I'd done alright with Eric. At least according to my family. I was pretty fucking awesome.

And maybe slightly happy from the wine.

And I decided that was a good thing when I saw Sam, Tray and Pam walking past with bowls heaped full of dessert. "Are they supposed to be helping themselves to that already?" I asked Eric.

"Oh…fuck it. Let them enjoy themselves" Eric muttered, watching as Amelia and Felicia brought up the rear.

"Yep" I said. "Fuck it, indeed."

"I'm not fuckin' old!" Jason complained again. "Crystal, fuckin' tell them would ya?" He looked hopefully at Crystal who'd just sat back in her chair.

"Oh, Jason" she said. "You're a grumpy old man, aren't you?" She smiled but it was a nice smile. She wasn't laughing at Jason; she was appreciating him for who he was. At least that's how I saw it. I was glad she liked my brother, someone had to.

"Oh. Fuck off." Jason muttered, and Crystal laughed.

EPOV

We were getting through the night slowly. We had some dessert, although Sookie wanted to dissect every option they had and explain why she thought it was shit. It was kind of shit, but it was shit that was there so I was eating it. Same with the cake really, it appeared on the table and it seemed like a good idea to eat it.

"Want coffee?" I said to Sookie, who was busy chatting to Hadley and Uncle Trev, having swapped seats with Aunty Linda somewhere during the evening.

"Yeah" she said. "I could have one."

I walked over to where they'd set up a coffee machine and was trying to figure out what button to push when I heard someone cough next to me. Fuck, I hoped they weren't contagious.

"Uh…Eric?" they asked, and I turned to the side to look at…Wayne. Huh.

"Yeah, uh, Mum said youse guys were here, eh?" he said, looking sideways at the coffee machine.

"Yeah" I agreed. "We are." And then there was silence for a moment. "So…uh, you're well?" I asked.

"Yep" Wayne said, nodding vigorously. "I, uh, I went back up North, eh? After school. I like it up there. I'm, uh…there's this polytechnic, and I'm helping out with the classes, on, uh, carving, eh?"

"You're teaching?" I asked him. When did Wayne get old enough to be a teacher?

"Yeah…sorta. Mostly I just help the people that come in, eh. Do lots of setting up; tell them not to fuck it up. Stuff like that. But it's good, eh? I like it."

I was still processing that image when Ngaihuia came over. I wondered how the hell this was going to go, how Wayne was going to feel about his sister who was really his daughter. "What's up, bubs?" he asked her.

"Can you get Jase a cup of tea? If you're up here. He wanted me to get him one, but Pam and me are busy. So…you can do it, eh?"

"Yeah" Wayne said, wearily. "I'll do it."

"Choice" Ngaihuia said, and she ran off. I watched Wayne and his eyes followed Ngaihuia and there it was, that tiny bit of regret he'd have to fucking carry around with him for the rest of his life. But it was over in a second and he turned back to me. "Bloody Jase, eh?" he said. "Can't fuckin' function without his tea, eh? _And_ he's gettin' me to drive them back to the motel. Says he'll get his car in the morning."

"It's probably wise" I said.

"Yeah" Wayne agreed. "Prob'ly, eh? Good thing I brought the fuckin' van with me." I was about to reply to that, when a small blonde woman appeared at Wayne's arm.

"Are you getting' my tea?" she asked him.

"Yeah, just hold your fuckin' horses" Wayne said. "This is Eric. Eric this is Janmaree." Janmaree looked at me, but didn't seem overly impressed. "Oh" she said. "Hello."

"Hello" I said. "Nice to meet you."

"Yeah, so you're like Wayne's, uh, uncle?" she asked, looking me up and down.

"Um…something like that" I said. Fucked if I knew how it worked.

"Oh. OK" she said, still not seeming that impressed. "I'm going to talk to your mum, babe" she said to Wayne.

"OK" Wayne said. "I'll bring the teas over, eh?"

"Cool" she said, and she wandered off.

"So that's your…girlfriend?" I asked Wayne.

"Yeah" he said. And then he stared at where she'd gone. "Fuck, I hope Mum's nice to her, eh? Sometimes she's a bit shitty about Janmaree."

"Why?" I asked. She didn't seem that bad to me.

Wayne shrugged. "She doesn't like it 'cos Janmaree's older, eh? And, you know, there's the kids and stuff…" he shrugged. "I like her though, eh?" He looked at me, waiting to see what I'd say.

"Well…that's the important part" I said to him. Probably it was. Shit, I hoped he didn't want advice. I was shit at advice.

"Yeah, it is eh?" Wayne agreed, and then he took the cups of tea he'd made and walked back to the table. I pushed some buttons on the coffee machine and hoped like fuck I'd get something drinkable.

SPOV

Our table got quite sociable when all the speeches were done. Wayne dropped in with his new girlfriend Janmaree. She seemed nice, although I could tell Crystal wasn't all that fond of her. I wondered what it would be like if your sons started bringing home random women that you were supposed to like. I could kind of see why Crystal might be feeling a bit protective.

I looked over at Sam and Tray who were chasing Pam and Ngaihuia around between the tables. They seemed to have…were those prawns, in their hands? I figured I had a few years yet to worry about random girls showing up.

In the meantime I chatted to Wayne. "It's going really good up North, eh Aunty" he said. "And my uncle, he said I could have some land, and build myself a house, eh. That'll be good. And then Janmaree and her kids, they can move in too, eh?"

Oh. She had kids. I looked at Wayne who had turned to gaze lovingly at Janmaree. Yeah, maybe I could see Crystal's problem because I wasn't sure I'd be that thrilled with it either. But then, well, Crystal was probably just lucky my Mum wasn't around to cast any aspersions about her.

And I was probably very lucky that Eric's mother had gone M.I.A long before I was on the scene.

I hoped that Wayne was happy, and I hoped that he wasn't racing into anything with Janmaree just to reclaim the family he maybe thought he'd given up when he gave Ngaihuia to Crystal and Jason.

And then Ngaihuia herself came over. "Wayne's going to give us a lift back to the motel, bubs" Crystal said to her. "So you will get to go in his van."

"Oh. Choice!" she said, sounding scarily like Jason. I guess she had lived with him for a few years now. She whirled around and gave Wayne a big high-five and ran off again, while Wayne watched her go and Janmaree watched Wayne carefully.

Yeah, to me the arrangement seemed a bit odd, but to Ngaihuia, I guessed it was normal. She knew that Wayne wasn't just her brother, but to all intents and purposes, Crystal and Jason were the only mum and dad she'd ever known. Crystal seemed to take it in her stride too, and Jason just shrugged it off. It didn't seem to be uncommon in Crystal's family; from what she'd told me her dad and his new partner were raising some of her brother's kids, and one sister had given a baby to another one when she couldn't have kids herself. It sounded a bit odd to me, and it wasn't the way I'd been brought up to think about raising kids, but I'd resolved to keep out of it. I just hoped it didn't all blow up in their faces, because they were my family after all.

"You guys look really happy" I said to Wayne, which earned me a glance from Crystal, but I'd just have to live with that.

"Oh, yeah?" Wayne said, looking to Janmaree for confirmation. She smiled at him and his whole face lit up. "Yeah" he said. "We are, eh?"

Eventually Jason and Crystal and Wayne and Janmaree drifted off to talk to other people and I got up to dance with Eric, now that Hunter and Jenny had had their first dance. "This is nice" I said, as we moved around the dance floor.

"It is" Eric agreed. "Although I'm not sure that photo booth was a great idea."

"I think it's a lovely idea!" I said. "We're going in there in a minute."

"Mmm" Eric said, frowning over my head. "That's if it's still standing after the rest of the family have been through it."

"Don't want to know-oh" I sing-songed. "They're not bothering me so I don't need to know what they're doing."

"Well, there'll be photographic proof of what's been going on anyway" Eric mused, which didn't sound that great. But I wasn't going to think about it. Not while I was having such a nice time dancing. And then we did go in the photo booth, and came out with a nice little strip of photos to remember the wedding by. The other strip went into an album for the bride and groom and Eric and I wrote messages of good luck to them on the page next to it.

As we were finishing Hunter and Jenny came past, and flicked through the photos to see what had been taken. "That's a good one" Hunter said to me, pointing to one of Sam and Tray.

"Yeah, no it's not" I said. "But I think the prawns are a nice touch."

"Where are the boys, anyway?" I asked Eric, and he scanned the room, and then frowned. "I'll go and look for them" he said, and he left and I wandered back to the table.

When I got back there, I was the only one at the table, but not for long. Amelia plonked herself down on the chair next to me. "I can't believe I had to sit at the _kid's_ table!" she moaned.

"Well, Tama and Aroha were there" I said. "And they're older than you."

Amelia sighed. "Tama's a drongo and Aroha likes Felicia better. It's not fair! I had no one to talk to, and the boys were stupid and made Pam upset and you guys were all sitting here and it was nice and quiet and you go to enjoy it."

"I had to sit next to my brother" I pointed out, but that didn't really wash with Amelia. "And all Aroha did" she continued, without even acknowledging that I'd spoken, "was go on and on about this _boyfriend_ she has, and how like, _special_ he is and stuff. I bet he's not. Do you think he's even real?"

I shrugged. "I don't know" I said. "But it's probably true." That earned me a glare from Amelia. "Well anyway, you've got Riley." That got me a special glare denoting how stupid I was for even mentioning Riley's name.

I really couldn't win with Amelia sometimes.

She sighed, loudly. 'It's not the same!" she huffed. "That's just…well, it's Riley." She folded her arms and looked annoyed.

"But you like Riley" I pointed out. Amelia shrugged. I wanted to add that I liked Riley, but I didn't think that was going to sell him to Amelia.

Amelia looked down at the table. "I dunno" she said, sullenly. "He's alright."

"He likes you" I said. "So…you know…just be nice to him…" But Amelia seemed to ignore the second sentence; instead her head had popped up as soon as I said he liked her. "He does?" she asked.

"Well…yeah" I said. "At least I think he does."

Amelia sighed. "But you're…" she didn't finish that, but I'm pretty sure the missing word was 'old'. Yeah, and I felt it tonight.

"I'm old enough to have seen it before" I said. "And he does. But you have to decide if you like him. Don't string him along just because it's convenient. No one deserves that."

Amelia looked thoughtful and toyed with some of the confetti on the table. She let out a noisy sigh. "He's younger than me" she mumbled, and I almost didn't catch what she said. And then I realised.

"Four months" I pointed out. "Four months is nothing!"

"But he's in a _different year_! So you know, like, he's only in Year 9…"

"I can't see it makes _that_ much of a difference" I said. And I really couldn't.

"Of course _you_ can't!" Amelia wailed. "You married Eric and he's like, _waaaay _younger than you are. That's totally weird. I mean, I wouldn't want to go out with someone who thought it was funny to make prawns fight or something…so, ugh. Boys are dumb when they're little."

"Um…he was mostly grown-up when I got him" I pointed out, but Amelia made a dismissive hand-wave. I'm not sure whether that was meant to mean that Eric hadn't really been grown up or that I was just talking nonsense about everything.

"You're just weird!" Amelia said again, as Aunty Linda came over to get her cigarettes out of her handbag. "What's going on love?" she asked.

"Oh, Mum's weird 'cos she married someone who was, like, waaay younger than she was." Amelia looked at Aunty Linda expecting confirmation of my weirdness, instead Aunty Linda smiled. "Yeah" she said. "Sookie did well there, didn't you love?" And then she winked at Amelia and me and walked off going "Trev? Trev? I'm just going outside for a smoke."

Amelia turned to me and looked confused. "See?" I said. "It's actually a good thing. Apparently. In my family, anyway. I think I've won some kind of prize." I shrugged. I didn't get what all the fuss was about, but for the first time in my life Aunty Linda and Hadley actually looked at me like I was the cool one.

"You won Eric!" Amelia pointed out. "How is that a prize?"

I didn't really have an answer to that one, but luckily Felicia arrived over at that point. "What's happening, dudes?" she asked, sitting down next to Amelia, who rolled her eyes at her sister.

"We're just talking" Amelia said.

"Oh, OK" Felicia replied, and then she turned to me. "Hey, did you know that Israel's in the Auckland Blues squad? Like for real? Aroha asked him if he was and he said yeah. He might be an All Black soon. That's so cool!" She turned and looked at Hunter's half-brother Israel with a kind of dreamy expression.

"Um…I think I heard?" I said. "How did you know he's in line for the All Blacks?"

"Oh, it was on the radio" she said, still not taking her eyes off of Israel, who was busy dancing with his girlfriend. I wasn't sure I'd ever seen Felicia quite so enamoured of anyone before.

"Are you the one who keeps turning the car radio to Radio Sport?" I asked. Felicia shrugged, but didn't take her eyes off Israel. "Sometimes it's Dad" she said. "But he moans if they talk too much about cricket and then you can't hear what they're saying about the Black Caps."

"Aunty Linda thinks Dad's a prize and Mum won him" Amelia blurted out. Felicia shrugged. Pam came over. "What's a prize?"

"Dad!" Amelia said, still looking perplexed about the whole thing.

"Prizes are usually sparkly" Pam mused. "Dad's not sparkly."

"Dad's just grumpy" Amelia added.

"Dad doesn't get cricket, and he yells at the radio" Felicia said, after a moment.

"Alright, lay off Dad" I said. "Why don't you go and dance?"

Amelia sighed. "Come on" she said to Felicia.

"What? Why?" Felicia looked confused.

"Because you're my sister, and you have to dance with me!"

"I don't!" Felicia complained. "I'll dance!" Pam said, but Amelia ignored her.

Amelia huffed, and slumped down in her seat. "It's not fair" she moaned. "I don't have anyone to dance with."

"Well…if you wait until Dad gets back, maybe you could dance with him?" I tried. It didn't go down well.

"No!" Amelia complained, "I don't want to dance with him."

"He's a good dancer" I said. I liked dancing with Eric.

Amelia had other ideas though. She snorted, somewhat unattractively. "He's not" she said. And then she looked thoughtful. "Well…_maybe_ he's OK when he's, like, holding on to you and pushing you around…"

"And groping her bum" Felicia interjected, and Amelia scowled at her. "Yeah, euw, thanks for the scarring mental image, Leesh" Amelia said, and Felicia shrugged. "We all saw that" she said, and Pam nodded in agreement.

"But when he's not attached to you" Amelia continued, "then, well…it's kind of, like, um…"

"He dances like a dork" Felicia finished for her.

"No he doesn't!" I said. Eric was my prize and I kind of felt like I had to defend him in this. Plus I still thought he was a good dancer.

Amelia sighed. "He does. I think it's the arms…they're too long, or something. And he flings them."

"I think you were watching something totally different" I said, feeling a bit grumpy about the whole thing.

"Nah" Felicia said. "We weren't. Hey, do you think I can ask for an autograph?"

"Well, maybe" I said.

"You just like that you do all the kissing and stuff, when you're dancing" Amelia said. "That's why you think it's good."

"No! I like to dance" I said.

"Yeah…but you keep kissing him" Amelia said, refusing to let it drop.

"You kissed him here" Pam said, holding up the strip of photos from the photo booth, and pointing to one where we were kissing. She screwed up her face.

"Well, yeah" I said. "It's a wedding. People do things like that at weddings." Amelia sighed and rolled her eyes, Felicia kept her attention on Israel.

"Will Daddy dance with me?" Pam asked plaintively. "I think he dances OK!"

"Really Pam?" Amelia asked, and Pam looked a bit chastened. "I like Daddy" she mumbled. "And he doesn't just jump on the spot like Uncle Jason does."

"Look" I said. "Why don't we all go and dance together?" There was a chorus of sighs, but they all got up to join me. As we walked to the dance floor I caught Amelia muttering "I wish Riley was here" to herself. Maybe she had her answer after all.

EPOV

Eventually I tracked the boys down to the parking lot, where they were examining all the cars parked there. "Hey look at this one, Dad!" Tray called out. "Look! Someone's got a Ferrari. Why can't we have a Ferrari?"

"Um…because it doesn't fit five kids and a dog in it" I pointed out.

"Oh, yeah" Tray said, reaching out to touch the paintwork. I pushed his hand away. "If you set off an alarm the owner is going to be a bit pissed, don't you think?"

Tray shrugged, Sam nodded. "Why don't you come back inside?" I suggested. It was fucking cold out here; I wished I hadn't left my jacket on the back of my seat inside.

"Nah" Tray said. "It's boring in there. There's nothing to do."

"There's dancing?" I suggested, and they looked less than thrilled with that idea.

"Mum'll want to dance with us" Sam pointed out.

"Well…that's not that bad" I said to them. "I like dancing with Sookie."

Sam just shrugged and didn't say anything else. And then I realised Tray had disappeared. Although I heard his voice coming through the darkness. "It's one of those Audis" he shouted. "With the new kind of lights."

"That's nice" I called back. "But we're going inside now." There was silence for a moment and then Tray came thundering out of the darkness and ran straight for Sam who took off as well. At least they were going in the direction of the reception room, I figured, as I turned to follow them.

When I caught up they were running round and round the fountain in front of the main doors, being watched by a laughing Aunty Linda who was standing there smoking. "Guys!" I said, trying to get their attention. "Inside."

"Nah" Tray said. "Inside's boring." He made a grab for Sam, who was doing quite a good job at keeping out of his grasp.

Now I could understand why they weren't cold out here in just their shirts, the waistcoats they'd started the night with having been left somewhere during the evening. Fuelled by all that Coke they'd consumed and probably several helpings of the meringue cases filled with chocolate mousse that had been part of the dessert selection, they were now fucking full of energy and hard to pin down.

Although I thought I might have a try. As Sam ran past, I grabbed him. But somehow, he managed to dodge me as well.

Well that wasn't fucking right.

I figured that Tray might be the easier target, so I let Sam run past again, and then swooped on Tray, who looked for a minute like he might leap into the fountain to avoid me, but I managed to grab him and swing him over my shoulder.

I just maybe hadn't counted on the fact that that would send Sam straight at me. He grabbed my thighs, and with the extra weight of the wriggling Tray, who was trying to practically crawl down my back to get away, I nearly went over backwards into the fountain.

Sam laughed, and ran, and I decided to cut my losses with Tray and returned him to the ground, and then headed towards Sam, who was giggling and backing away from me. I lunged, but I hadn't realised that we'd wandered over to the large chess board set out on the patio, and I just about tripped over a bishop, giving Sam a chance to run. I could hear him and Tray giggling in the dark. Fuck. It didn't used to be this hard to catch them.

"You alright, Eric mate?" Jason said, as he came over.

"Yeah, just. Fuck. Trying to drag the boys inside is a fucking mission these days." I ran my hand through my hair. They were here. Somewhere.

Jason laughed. "Well, it's borin' as shit in there now, eh? No more food and just fuckin' dancin',eh?." He sighed. "I just came out to get some air."

"I just came out to get the boys" I said. "But so far that hasn't exactly gone to plan. Ow, fuck!" I whirled around to see Sam, who'd just run over and poked me in the back, running off again. He and Tray were still giggling.

"Your problem is" Jason started "that you're outnumbered, eh? Plus you never played rugby. See it's all in the tackle. We should get Israel out here. You know he's gonna be an All Black, eh? Hadley's son? Israel? Israel Taufa?" I guess I looked blank at that because Jason just shrugged and carried on. "So he'd sort these little sods out for you."

"I don't really need help…" I said, as Tray jumped out of their hiding place and jumped around to get my attention. Then he got hauled back by Sam who whispered loudly "Don't let him see you, dickbrain!"

"Yeah, you do" Jason said. "But luckily, I was pretty good at League. OK, I'll get Tray, you get Sam" and Jason took off towards the boys. Fuck it. I didn't have much choice but to join him.

SPOV

When Eric finally arrived back with the boys in tow, all three of them were looking hot and sweaty and were clutching orange juices. "Dad said no more Coke" Sam grumbled.

"Well, no" I agreed. "I think one is enough."

"But we…" Tray started to say, and then I assumed from the way he jerked that Sam kicked him under the table. Tray shut up and decided to let that one pass. "So what have you guys been doing?" I asked them.

Tray shrugged. "Looking at cars. We saw a really good Ferrari, couple of Audis, there was a Beamer, but just a shit one…um…" I was kind of glad he stopped because I didn't share his enthusiasm for all things mechanical. I just liked cars that started first time without having to be coaxed and which didn't smell of wet dog and feet. I had something that met one of those criteria and that was probably as fancy as I was going to get in the near future.

"We played rugby. Sorta. With Dad and Uncle Jason" Sam added.

"Really?" I asked.

"Well, there wasn't a ball" Sam said. "But, you know, it took them a while to get us." He gave me a big grin, and then slurped some of his orange juice.

"I was trying to tire them out" Eric said, glaring at Sam. "I figured running around would work off some of that energy."

Sam shrugged. "I'm not that tired" he pointed out. I looked at Eric. He looked a bit tired.

"Well, if you've still got energy you can come and dance with me" I said, and Sam looked briefly miffed, but then decided he might oblige me after all. It was like the school socials I took the boys to, usually I could get one or two dances out of them and then they just decided that Mum was totally uncool and went to hang with their mates and drink orange cordial and generally pretend that I didn't exist.

I watched Wayne dancing with Janmaree and figured I should probably enjoy the days before they started dumping me in favour of strange girls I knew nothing about. And then I saw Amelia and Felicia doing the actions to _YMCA_ and giggling. Probably over how lame the song was. It was nice to see them getting on.

I had no luck getting Tray up to dance. He pulled out the skinned knee card, and showed me his war-wound, plus the really good scab he had developed on his ankle from a fall earlier in the week. The skinned knee didn't stop him chasing Sam around a bit more between the tables though. Funny how that worked.

EPOV

The evening was starting to wrap up now and I got the impression the kids were probably ready to go. They'd all come over and complain about having to dance, or their siblings, and look totally disgusted with whatever we suggested they do, and then they'd leave again. Tray especially wasn't thrilled when I told him that I'd much rather they weren't here either, and that it was just Sookie and I and we could enjoy the wedding without the constant complaints. He stood there looking stunned, until Sam said "They just want to do the gross kissing stuff while we're not around", and then the pair of them left again. The only happy one was Felicia because she had some guy's autograph, or something. I hadn't realised there was anyone famous here, but she seemed to know all about him. And that she was related to him, which was total fucking news to me.

But I was used to tired kids so I didn't really think much of it when a little voice next to me said "Pick'p! Pick'p me!" So I did. And that was how I found myself with Hunter's kid on my lap.

"I think he likes you" Sookie commented. "He's been dodging Hadley and Aunty Linda for a while now, and trying to get Hunter to carry him around all the time. Maybe you're the next best thing."

"Mmm" I agreed, but I wasn't really sure I was. The kid just sat there and played with my tie, which was OK. I vaguely remembered how nice it had been when Sam and Tray had been little like this and when you wanted to move them you could just pick one up under each arm and ignore the protests and the squirming.

And then the kid said "Tuggle me" and leaned in and gave me a hug, putting his head on my shoulder. That was nice too. I did like the kids now they were bigger, but, fuck; I kind of missed them being little sometimes.

But not enough to go back to it.

Sookie looked over wistfully, and patted the kid's back. "I miss toddler cuddles" she said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "They're nice…just maybe a bit sticky. And drooly." And that was when I registered that the kid's breathing was shallow and noisy and his left arm had started to drop. It flopped completely. Yep, he was asleep.

"Aw" Sookie said. "He really likes you."

"Lots of people like me, Sookie" I pointed out. "But not that many of them fall asleep on me."

"No" Sookie agreed. "Usually it's the other way round. Go Ryder!" She laughed, and carried on patting the kid's back. Well, Ryder's back. Fuck. Who the hell names their kid Ryder?

SPOV

Hadley came back to the table just after a very tired Ryder collapsed on Eric's chest. "Huh" she said, "Look at you two. Practicing to be grandparents, are you?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.

"Fuck off" I said. I wasn't old enough to be a grandmother. "That's years away."

Hadley shrugged. "Not necessarily, I mean. Amelia's what, sixteen?"

"Fourteen" I corrected.

Hadley shrugged. "Well, whatever. She could surprise you!" She laughed and sat back down.

"She'd better not!" I said, as I saw the horrified expression cross Eric's face.

"Don't knock being a grandparent" Hadley said. "It's great. I look after Ryder two days a week for Jenny and Hunter and I love it. So much better this time around."

"I've only just got Pam off to school" I pointed out. "And anyway, Hunter was what? Twenty-six before he became a dad. That's a way off for Amelia."

Hadley shrugged again. "It'll come around soon enough."

"What will?" Aunty Linda said, sitting down with a cold drink.

"Being a grandparent" Hadley explained. "I was saying to Sookie that she might not have that long to wait."

Aunty Linda shrugged. "Sometimes it comes around too quickly" she said, looking at Hadley who had obviously heard that one before and didn't react. "And anyway" she continued. "Eric's too young to be a granddad."

"I guess…" Hadley said, slowly.

"Unless he's got some other kids Sookie doesn't know about!" Aunty Linda said, laughing at her own joke. Well, what she thought was a joke. Aunty Linda was kind of tactless sometimes, but that was nothing new.

Eric frowned and looked like he was going to fight the allegations, so, for the sake of peace I decided to step in and change the subject. "Um, Hadley" I said. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Yeah, alright" she said, turning from Aunty Linda to look at me.

"I've always wondered…what's up with Tony's name?" It had bugged me for years.

"Tony's name?" Hadley repeated slowly.

"Yeah…um…" I felt a bit embarrassed for bringing it up, but decided to press on. "Just that his brothers have those, um, well names from the Bible…" I nodded to where Elijah and Ephraim were talking to the woman I assumed was their mother. She did look kind of formidable in her Sunday best, complete with hat. "And Tony is well…Tony…"

"Ohhh" Hadley said, realisation dawning. "Oh, well really he's Ezekiel."

"He is?" I asked.

"Yup, and he used to go by Zeke, but he…uh, well he got into a lot of trouble when he was younger. Before he met me, eh? And some of it was…well, it was the people he was hanging out with. So he didn't want to be Zeke anymore. So now he's Tony. From his middle name, Antoine."

"Oh" I said. Well that made sense; I might have been tempted to change my name too. "His mother likes um…well, different names, doesn't she?"

Hadley rolled her eyes. "Don't I know it? We named Samson and Israel to please her, but by God, I was buggered if I'd do the same when I had Lita. She still didn't fuckin' like me and by that stage, the feeling was pretty mutual. I don't think she'll ever like me." She turned and glared at Tony's mum's back.

"She's a pretty hard woman, alright" Aunty Linda said, patting Hadley's hand. "But no one is going to be good enough for her boys, you know that. And you're too good to her, you really are."

Hadley shrugged, but she looked pleased to have her mum on her side. "Yeah, I know" she said. "And I'm never going to be like that to Jenny" she shook her head vehemently. "Never." She gazed over at Hunter and Jenny who were laughing with their friends, and she looked a little wistful.

Not long after that, it was really time to go home. We realised this when I found Pam asleep with her head on the table. Poor Pam, she could sleep anywhere at any time if she had to. I figured it was because her babyhood had been totally devoid of any routines and her schedule had been the schedule of her siblings, organised around school and pre-school drop-offs and pick-ups, errands, groceries, mother-help, and occasional forays into either my work or Eric's if we didn't know what else to do with her for a few hours. It was so totally different to my experiences with Amelia as a baby. I remembered trips to the shops that I'd limit to an hour only, so she could get home and have a 'good sleep' (despite the fact she slept while out), and being so determined that she had a whole nap time routine involving lullaby music, mobiles, favourite blankets and a very strict timetable.

Bill, who thought he was the expert on babies, having seen four sisters come into this world, thought I was a bit nuts. Possibly I was. But Amelia was first and Amelia got all the rules I thought were important to raising a baby.

Pam got the ability to sleep with confetti stuck to her face and her brothers trying to push each other off chairs next to her.

"OK guys" I said, when I discovered the situation. "Let's get going." I walked back to our table and we managed to move Ryder off Eric and onto Hadley without him waking up. "You're so good with wee ones" Aunty Linda said to Eric, patting his sleeve.

"Yeah. Uh, thanks" Eric said, looking far more disturbed by Aunty Linda's patting than he was by the patch of drool he was now sporting on one shoulder. It was only going to get worse as he carried Pam to the car anyway, I figured.

But she woke up in time to promise undying friendship to Ngaihuia, and we said our goodbyes to everyone as Wayne escorted Jason and Crystal out to his van to drive them to the motel. "See you!" I called to them all.

"Yep, see you Sook!" Jason called back, and then he went back to instructing Wayne on how to drive safely on country roads. Yeah, Wayne probably knew that one already.

We said goodbye to Hadley, and Aunty Linda and Uncle Trev, and I collected up the little pile of photo booth strips that belonged to our family. And then I sought out Hunter and Jenny so we could say goodbye to them.

"Thanks for inviting us" I said to Hunter. "It's been awesome, it really has."

"Oh, thanks for coming Sookie" he said, and he hugged me and he was so big and solid now. Wow. He really was a grown-up, not the little kid I always thought of him as. In my mind he was still Sam's age and probably always would be.

Getting older really sucked.

"It was a lovely day" I said to Jenny, and she looked a bit bashful. "Oh, thanks" she said.

"And we loved hanging out with Ryder" I added. "So much easier to deal with when they're that age, although I guess you don't realise it so much now."

"Oh yeah" Hunter said. "I saw he fell asleep on Eric."

"Well, lots of people like Eric" I said. "He seems to be quite popular."

Hunter nodded. "He's a good guy" he said, looking serious.

"Well, all the best for your future" I said, trying not to let on that I knew about the pregnancy. And probably failing, by the way Jenny put her hands on her stomach.

We shepherded all the kids out to the car. "I don't want to go home _yet_!" Amelia complained. "Everyone else is still staying." I sighed. She so took after her aunts at times.

"It's time to go, Ames" Eric said, opening up the car door.

"And, anyway, you said it was boring before" I pointed out. Amelia shrugged, and reluctantly climbed into her car.

The journey back to the motel only took about five minutes, and, luckily, we knew where the entrance was this time. Pam started to fret about the fact that Ngaihuia hadn't been to see her Barbies, but I had to palm her off by saying she could show her in the morning.

Eric started to fret about three girls in a motel room alone, and delivered several instructions about keeping the windows closed and the door locked. I'm not sure they were really listening to him.

Tray just started to squirm and ask how long until we got there. "See?" Eric said. "That's what all that Coke gets you."

Tray didn't say anything to that, he just squirmed some more, while Felicia whispered "Loser!" to him. Sam said "Spoon!" and that set off a round of them calling each other spoon. Eric looked at me, but I shrugged. I didn't get the insult either.

Once we were there we had to get everyone into bed. I gave the girls fifteen minutes in their room, during which time I took down my hair, and then I went next door to find none of them in bed and Felicia and Amelia fighting over the TV remote. Pam was wandering around in her nightie, the one with the picture of Tinkerbell which read 'I'm cute, let's put me in charge.' I was tempted, given the behaviour of her older sisters.

"Just get into bed!" I said, and I left.

Five minutes later, when I could still hear fighting through the shared wall, I sent Eric to talk to them. I could hear Eric's voice, and then it got a lot quieter. I decided I might have a shower now the boys had finally finished in the bathroom. It had been a long day.

EPOV

The girls were a fucking nightmare. They argued and they didn't listen and they were only concerned with who was sleeping on what side of the bed and how long everyone else had been in the bathroom. Poor Pam looked half asleep but still managed the odd interjection when Amelia and Felicia got really heated.

I managed to calm them down. Well, I told them to get the fuck to bed or else they'd all be sleeping on the floor next door when I could keep an eye on them, and then I checked the windows, told them not to open the door to anyone that wasn't me and left for the night.

Fuck, I hoped they were OK. You didn't really think about the safety of motel rooms until you had your three daughters sleeping alone in one. Sure, I was next door but that would mean nothing if someone fucking got in. And although there were only cows over the back fence, I wasn't sure that was that comforting.

I didn't think cows made particularly good watch animals.

I went back to our motel room and checked on the boys. They were fucking dead to the world, thank fuck. I hoped they stayed that way, and that their bladders didn't wake them up. There'd been a certain amount of pushing and shoving for the bathroom when we'd got back and it had nearly ended in disaster and Sookie hadn't been thrilled with Tray asking if he could just go outside and use a tree.

But Sookie wasn't anywhere to be found. Well, she wasn't in our tiny room in the motel. And then I heard the shower switch on. Fuck, I hope she hadn't locked the door to keep the boys out. I tried it and it turned, fucking excellent.

And so was the view when I walked in. I'd realised the bath was kind of high, because I'd had to step up into it when I'd used the shower, but I maybe hadn't realised just how high it was. But now that Sookie was standing in there, under the shower, doing that thing where she stretched her back and basically just stuck her boobs and her butt out I realised that yeah, that was pretty fucking awesome.

"You can't join me" Sookie warned, when she realised I was standing there. "It's a bit chilly with no curtain, and if you get in here you'll hog all the water and it'll be hopeless."

"I don't hog the water" I pointed out. "It's not my fault I need more of it."

Sookie sighed, but she didn't say anything. "We could, uh, use the bath?" I suggested.

"Yeah, but I'm wet now, so I'd get cold while it filled up" she said.

"There are towels that'll fix that problem" I pointed out. Sookie shrugged. "You did bring extra towels" I said, pointing to the bag of them on the floor which had been just one more thing that I'd had to fit into the car on the way up here.

"That's because you don't re-use towels" Sookie said.

"Well, not if they're wet." Wet towels were kind of gross.

"They dry better if you don't leave them in a heap" Sookie countered. I didn't think that was me, I think she was confusing me with one of the kids, but I let it drop for the sake of the possibility of getting her in the damn bath.

"It'll be nice in the bath" I said, coming closer so I started to feel the fine spray from the shower. Yeah, this was a shit arrangement really.

Sookie sighed. "I guess" she said. She didn't sound enthusiastic but that was probably as good as I was going to get out of her at this late hour.

"Great" I said, holding out a towel. "Turn the shower off then." Sookie sighed again, but switched the water off and held out her hand for the towel. "You're sure they're all asleep?" she asked. "Yep" I confirmed. Well, I was sure about two of them. Possibly three. And that was most of them.

"Lock the door" Sookie warned. "I don't want to be sprung in the bath."

"They walk in on showers all the time" I said, as I did lock the door.

"Yeah…but, well. You know. There will be questions. About why we're sharing and stuff."

I shrugged, and pulled the lever to change over the water so it came out of the bath taps. And then I put in the plug and started filling the bath. "Water conservation" I said.

"I don't think they'll buy it" Sookie said. "But as long as the door is locked, we should be OK."

As long as Sam and Tray's bladders held and Amelia didn't keep blocking everyone else from the bathroom next door we should be OK, I thought. But I wasn't going to say that.

Not when the bath was filling and I was just about to get Sookie into it.

SPOV

Eric was right, the bath was nice. Nicer than the shower over it, anyway. Eventually I even let him put the bubbles on, I'd worried that it might wake the kids, but it didn't seem to. Well, not that we heard anyway. And by that stage I had my mind on other things, and so did Eric.

I'd ended up sitting with my back to his chest and it was nice like that. Warm. Kind of relaxing.

Quite a big turn-on, actually.

And then Eric's hand drifted down between my legs and I felt even more relaxed, the warm water was working wonders. I was so relaxed that my legs just fell to the side leaving more room for his hand and the things his fingers were doing. Mostly he seemed to be trying to make me orgasm and I can't say that I wasn't on-board with that idea as well. And when it arrived, it was a bloody good orgasm and upped my relaxation factor quite significantly.

"Feeling OK?" Eric murmured into my hair.

"Yeah" I said, somewhat dreamily, as I reached behind me to stroke his penis. We stayed like that for a few moments and then I thought of something. "OK" I said. "Want to sit on the edge?"

"Yep" Eric said, as he moved up and almost tipped me into the water in the process. Guess he was keen on having his turn then.

"Are you going to be cold?" I asked him, as he arranged himself on the edge.

"I'm trusting you to keep me warm" he said.

"Oh. Well, I can keep this bit warm" I said, before I took him into my mouth and swirled my tongue around a few times. Eric didn't say anything to that. Well not real words anyway. There were some noises and a few groans, and an "Oh, fuck" as I stroked his balls just before he came.

I moved away and Eric slid back down into the bath and kissed me, deeply. "That was good" he murmured.

"Yeah" I said. "And the clean-up is easy."

Eric chuckled. "In that case, must be your turn. Up on the side." He patted the edge of the bath.

"I had my turn" I said automatically, and Eric raised his eyebrows. "But I'll take another one." I sat on the edge, which was wide but not overly comfortable, and I realised I was cold. "Hang on" I said, and I leaned back to pick up the towel I'd had before which had ended up in a heap on the floor. It was a bit damp, but it would do.

"You ready?" Eric asked.

"Yep" I confirmed, as he swung one of my legs over his shoulder and put a hand on each of my hips. I was going to say something about the problems with leaving your towel in a pile, but then he placed his mouth right on my clit and the damp towel seemed a lot less important now.

"I have to say, having seconds is pretty good" I said to Eric, as I slid back down into the bath.

"The boys would probably agree with you" Eric said, as he put his arms around me and held me against his chest.

"I don't even want to know what they ate tonight" I said. "And some of those photo booth pictures are kind of worrying."

"I'm just impressed they could all fit in the booth" Eric mused.

"Well, you can only see Tray's foot" I said. "But at least we've got a photo of them all together. That's kind of a rare occurrence." We were quiet for a bit, just enjoying each other and that nice gooey state you get sometimes after you reconnect through orgasms and realise that, actually, you really do like each other when it's just you.

"I wonder what it will be like" I said.

"What?" Eric asked, and I realised he hadn't been following along with what was going on inside my head.

"Amelia's wedding…well, whoever's really. Whoever gets there first. Or all of them. I don't know. It'd be weird, wouldn't it? To see them all grown up?"

"Don't" Eric whispered. "Don't wish our lives away as well. You're as bad as the girls."

I shrugged. "I was just thinking about it" I said. "You know…it's weird to see Jason and Hadley so old, and Hadley's a gran, it just kind of hit home to me how fast it all goes, really. You blink and they're all grown up."

Eric sighed. "I thought we did this" he said, "When Pam went to school?"

"Yeah, this isn't about keeping them little though" I tried to explain. "More about…worrying what they'll be like as adults."

"I think it's too early to worry" Eric said, kissing my shoulder.

"Well…not worry then. But wonder. I wonder what they'll be like."

"I think they'll be the same as they are now, Sookie. Just bigger."

"You think Pam'll still fall asleep at parties? And Tray and Sam will feel the need to fight each other constantly?"

"I think…well, I think they'll still be them anyway" Eric said. "And that's all that matters really."

"It does" I said, and then there was knocking on the door. "Mum?" Trays voice said. "Dad? I can't get in and I need to pee!"

"And back to reality" Eric said, as he slid through the water and stood up to get out and open up the door to Tray.

**A/N OK, so I probably should have said before, but as a reminder Ngaihuia's name is pronounced Nye-who-ee-ah. Tama is Tar-mar, and Aroha is A-row-har.**

**L&P is our national soft drink, now made by Coca-Cola. It's short for Lemon & Paeroa.**

**The League that Jason mentions is Rugby League, a different code to Rugby Union which is what the All Blacks (our national team) play. The Auckland Blues are the Auckland Rugby Union team. The Black Caps are the national cricket team.**

**For use of the term spoon, and a look at something that Kiwis find funny (well, it makes me and my husband laugh), check out this ad on drink-driving. www (dot) youtube (dot) com **/watch?v=dIYvD9DI1ZA****


	22. Chapter 22

**A/N Well for those of you who are still here, thank-you very much! The toddler would say thanks too, but she's too busy organising her Zhu zhu pet hamsters into an army.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I was running late but the important thing was that dinner was under control. At least that was my answer if anyone asked how long it was going to be. I'd been saying "It's under control" to that question for a while now and no one ever twigged that if they just stopped asking me how long it was going to be and just let me get on with it, it would be a lot easier to manage.

Of course part of the reason was that I had a helper. Not the helper I usually got either, Sam had last been seen swinging a dead mouse around and complaining bitterly that Stan had left it in his and Tray's room. I was kind of impressed that they'd parted the crap all over the floor enough to locate a small dead mouse, so I wasn't feeling that badly towards Stan just at that moment, although I did have to remind Sam that dead mice went into the bin, not in your brother's lunchbox, no matter how 'funny' that joke would be in the morning.

No, the helper I had tonight was Pam. And that was kind of nice, despite the fact that she sometimes thought she was in charge and the fact she was only doing it because she was desperate for me to go and buy some stuffing for the first soft-toy she'd finished knitting, and then help her sew up the soft-toy as well.

Bizarrely, the knitting lessons had gone OK. Probably because Pam could pull out a really good little-girl act when she had to. When I went round to Lorena's flat to pick them all up, having left Amelia and Felicia there as back-up too, Lorena had seemed a bit stunned. "She's, uh, she's a very _good_ girl, isn't she Sookie?" Lorena had said, after Pam thanked her for the lesson while Amelia and Felicia alternately stared at their phones and mumbled veiled threats at each other. I wasn't sure exactly what Lorena had expected the product of mine and Eric's DNA to turn out like, but it obviously wasn't Pam. Possibly she was now wondering why Bill's daughters had turned out to be quite high in the attributes of bossiness and loudness, with the occasional dash of rudeness thrown in for good measure.

But now, of course, I was stuck with a multitude of little pieces of knitting which had to be assembled and a daughter who was itching to assemble them, and who was going to help me as much as she could until we did it.

"So what can I do?" Pam asked.

"Um…" I said, trying to figure it out in my head. The help was always nice, but sometimes it was easier to just go at these things flat-tack yourself and not have to think up five year old-friendly tasks in the middle. "Um…salad" I said. "You can do the salad." I threw the head of lettuce in Pam's direction and turned back to the cookbook I was using, while trying to keep one eye on where Sam went with that dead mouse.

"But what do I do with it?" Pam asked.

"Put it in the colander" I said, handing her the colander and looking at chicken portions and wondering if it was enough. I was trying a new recipe tonight, slightly amended from the original, so we were having oven-baked chicken with cherry tomatoes and courgettes, along with something they called 'smashed potatoes', which, as far as I could work out, were fried potatoes squashed with a pot-lid. And to go with that I was doing green beans _and_ salad, in the hope that if everyone was very hungry, they'd fill up on vegetables. It was always worth a shot I figured.

"The whole thing?" Pam asked, incredulously, and I realised she was still stuck on the salad. I'd moved on, however, to checking my boiling potato slices.

"Mmm?" I asked, as I ran her sentence through in my head again.

"The whole…" Pam started to say, but I'd figured it out by that time, so I interrupted. "No" I said. "Just…you know…pieces. Like a salad Pam. Like every other salad."

Pam sighed. "But how do I get it like that?" I turned around and she was holding up the lettuce as though the transformation from green soccer-ball type thing to actual leaves of lettuce was the most perplexing thing ever.

"Well…just…um…you know…" and then I lost my train of thought as I realised I hadn't sliced the courgettes up yet. Crap. Needed to do that now, so I grabbed out my chopping board.

"Just what?" Pam said, impatiently.

"Um…can you pass me one of the knives…?" I said, absentmindedly, grabbing the courgettes out of the fridge, and taking the knife off Pam as she passed it to me. I started slicing.

"Well I can't cut it" Pam announced. "I gave you the knife. I don't have a knife." She looked at the lettuce as though it might bite her.

"Just rip it up, Pam" I said. "Throw the leaves in the colander and then we'll give them a wash."

Pam sighed, but started pulling the lettuce apart. She cast a few longing glances at what were considered Eric's knives. Yeah, she'd love to get her hands on them. All the kids thought they were cool, I thought they were kind of creepy. They were stuck into a knife block that was the shape of a figure falling backwards, the shiny red of the figure and the silver of the knives matching the coffeemaker they sat next to pretty well. They'd been a Christmas present from the kids after Sam had insisted that Dad would think they were cool, and Eric did. I just wondered why the hell everyone else's crap ended up taking up space in my kitchen.

Amelia walked in looking miserable. "Where's the wheat bag?" she moaned.

"Um…pantry? Bathroom? Not sure" I answered. Nothing ever went back to where it was supposed to be.

"Well that's no good. I have cramps!" Amelia said dramatically, in the hope of copious amounts of sympathy. And I was sympathetic; I remembered only too well what it had been like for me when I'd been that age. Period pain was no fun. It was just I was also busy. And slightly behind with dinner.

"What're cramps?" Pam asked.

"You'll find out" Amelia said with a sigh. "You'll find out and then you'll be sorry you're a girl!"

"But I like being a girl!" Pam wailed. "I don't want to be a boy!" She cast a glance at Sam who was now supposedly doing some homework, but he didn't seem worried at her judgment.

"It's not all party dresses and sparkles" Amelia said again. "There's pain. There's freaking pain and there's no wheat bag anywhere!"

"Well, try actually looking for it" I suggested.

"You should take Pamol" Pam said. "We've got the strawberry one. That's better than the orange. Orange is yucky!"

Amelia sighed at both our suggestions. "I just need the wheat bag. And some grown-up painkillers!" she said.

"Bathroom" I suggested. "Then you need to try the bathroom."

"Oh, fine then!" Amelia said, stomping off.

"What're cramps? Why do I have to have them?" Pam asked.

"I'll tell you later on" I said to her, still mostly trying to concentrate on dinner.

"I don't like not knowing things. Secret things are mean" Pam grumbled.

"It's not really a secret, just something I haven't told you yet. But anyway, let's just concentrate on dinner, shall we?" I tried. "We can talk about it about at bedtime."

Pam turned her attention to other things. "What's that word?" she asked, peering at the cookbook that I was also now peering at. "Is it, um, to…tom…oh, it's tomato! Isn't it, Mummy?" She looked at me expectantly and I nodded. School had meant many things to Pam, but the joy of finally being able to read was probably one of the most exciting. Mainly, I think, because she was now privy to the mysterious things her older siblings had always been able to keep from her before. Pam was always convinced there was something she was missing out on, but I figured that came with being the youngest. She'd get there in time.

In the meantime, I was more worried about my timings for dinner. I had to get those potatoes out and put them in the fry pan, and then make sure I got the browned chicken pieces in the oven and what was the spice I was supposed to put on the chicken? I scanned the cookbook. Dried oregano. I headed to the pantry to get some, but something pinged against the back of my leg. Hard. It hurt.

"Ow!" I said and I turned around, only to be confronted with one of the most feared items from my childhood. "Tray" I said, as calmly as I could manage. "Where the hell did you get that?" I figured I probably knew the answer already, but I just didn't know how Jason had managed to give Tray one of his wooden rubber-band firing homemade guns. I was sure he hadn't had it at the wedding, and if he had, I was pretty sure one of the kids would have alerted me to the fact the first time Tray shot them with it. Those things were terrible, and, despite the fact he'd been specifically told not to use me for target practice, Jason hadn't been able to control himself. I briefly wondered whether it was sensible to let kids lose with things that could take eyes out, but Jason and I had grown up in a different, entirely less-PC age.

Tray, however, was growing up in this house. And he wasn't going to be using any of us as target practice.

Tray frowned, and looked at the gun as though he was surprised it was in his hand as well. "Oh. Um. Garage" he said.

"How long has it been in the garage?" I asked, and Tray looked confused. I glanced at Sam, who had looked up from his homework and just shrugged. OK, so he wasn't in on this then.

"I got it just now" Tray said. "I was out there…" I realised that I hadn't seen Tray for a while. Poor Tray. Sometimes I just had too many kids.

"Why've you got a gun?" Felicia asked, walking in and barging Tray out of the way. Tray raised the gun and aimed it at Felicia as she walked to the pantry, but I pointed a finger at him and said "No!" in my most stern voice. Felicia turned around and pulled a face at Tray, and then I noticed she was heading for the container that held the ginger crunch I'd baked. "No!" I said pointing at her, and she sighed and put it back on the shelf, walking back past Tray and giving him a swat as she did so. "Doofus" she muttered as she left the kitchen.

Tray turned to follow her, but I called him back. I still hadn't got to the bottom of the gun. "Tray" I said, and he stopped. "But where's it from?"

"What?"

"The gun" I said.

"Can I have a gun?" Pam asked, but I ignored her.

Tray still looked a bit confused. "I said!" he replied. "The garage!"

"But how did it get in the garage?" I asked again.

"It didn't!" Tray half-yelled. We were both getting frustrated.

Sam looked from Tray to me, and back again. "Was that the last of the wood?" he asked Tray.

"Yes!" Tray said, looking happy that someone was finally getting him.

"He made it" Sam said. "From the wood we got from Uncle Cal." He shrugged and went back to his homework.

"Did you Google how to make it?" I asked Tray. I hoped this wasn't going to be one of those things that started with looking up how to make rubber-band guns and ended up with instructions on explosives you could make from the stuff in the kitchen cupboards.

"What? No" Tray said, as if Google was a dirty word. I lived with Eric and his never-ending internet searches. Sometimes it was. "Uncle Jase told me how to make one, and I didn't have anything better to do."

"You don't have any homework?" I asked, momentarily distracted.

Tray shrugged and looked non-committal about the existence of homework. "So you just remembered how to make it? From what he told you?" I asked, going over to look at it more closely. Tray held it closer to his chest as though I might rip it out of his hands.

"Yeah" Tray said, watching me warily.

"Well…just don't shoot it at anyone else. Or any of the animals!" I warned, as Ivan turned up looking hopeful.

"OK" Tray said, and he ran off with his prize. "And get your homework!" I yelled after him, but he didn't reply to that. I knew that I should really go and hunt him down and make him get it out and do it, but I just needed to get dinner in the oven and the animals fed and everything was kind of piling up.

"Sam?" I said. "Can you feed the animals?" Sam got off the barstool he was sitting on and came into the kitchen, so I could finish up getting dinner ready. I browned the chicken and got it into the oven with the tomatoes and courgettes, drained the potatoes and put them into some fry pans, put the beans in the steamer in the microwave and started slicing up cheese and onion and capsicum for Pam to put into the salad. As I was doing all of that I was vaguely aware that Pam tried asking me about more words in the cookbook, but she gave up and asked Sam in the end. I hadn't heard her original question but she didn't seem happy with Sam's answer. "No" she said. "It isn't because that's not what we're cooking. I _saw_!"

"It is" Sam said. "There's more than one word for it, like the capsicums…" and then I stopped listening to them because I heard a very familiar shout from the hallway. "Fuck!" Eric yelled, and I went running out of the kitchen to fight that fire.

"What the fuck have you got?" Eric yelled at Tray. It had probably been too much to hope that Tray wouldn't be tempted to go for the biggest target in the family.

Tray held up his gun and took a step closer to me and away from Eric. "It's a rubber-band gun" I said to Eric. "The original Jason Stackhouse design by the look of it."

Tray turned to look at me. "Nah" he said. "I changed it a bit, 'cos Uncle Jase said you put a bit of wood there…" he pointed to the gun, "…but that didn't work so well, so I put two pieces on either side…"

"OK, Tray" Eric said. "I don't think we need a blow by blow account of the whole fucking construction, but just don't fucking shoot anyone, OK?"

"OK" Tray said. He made a tactical withdrawal and ran off before I could remind him about his homework again.

"I wonder if we should have taken it off him?" I mused.

Eric shrugged. "I think he'd just make another one" he said. "Probably it's better if he learns not to shoot everyone on fucking sight with that one. The next one might have better aim. Fuck that hurt."

"It does, doesn't it?" I agreed. "Jason used to shoot me all the time."

Eric came over to kiss me and something occurred to me. "You didn't seem surprised" I said. "That he made it…from just a description."

"Mmm" Eric said. "He had mentioned it to me."

"It's like the hole isn't it?" I asked, but Eric had just walked off by that stage, followed by Ivan who'd obviously wolfed his dinner down in order to come and pay proper fealty to Eric. Yeah, it was definitely like the hole. I was always the last to know.

I got back to the kitchen in time to start smashing the potatoes and Tray drifted in and announced he had spelling words, but he needed help, and Eric turned up and asked what was for dinner and when I said what it was, he looked pleased and said "Huh. Like grown-up food" and I realised that was code for 'does not have mince as the main ingredient' and I tried to rustle up a bit of indignation, but I was too busy. I sent Eric over to help Tray, told Amelia to try looking again in the bathroom for the wheat bag because I was sure it was in there, told Felicia that no, she couldn't go outside and practice shooting it was nearly dinner-time, and then Pam went over to tell Eric about all the help she'd given me.

"I did the salad!" she said. "Except I wasn't allowed the knife. Or a gun."

"You don't need a gun to make a salad, Pam" Eric said.

"No…but. How come Tray gets one?"

"When you can make your own gun, you can have one. OK spell colour, Tray."

"Remember the 'u'" I yelled at them, which was a mistake because Tray just yelled back "What 'u'?" and I think all I did was confuse them.

So by the time we all sat down to dinner, I was feeling kind of tired. But that was nothing new, really. Evenings were always like this. It was a mad rush to get everyone fed and deal with all the requests and the dramas and the total surprise weapons. So this was standard, and it was all good.

Except when Eric decided to tell me how much he liked dinner, it stopped being good. "This is nice" he said. "With the courgettes."

I opened my mouth to say thank-you, but Pam got in first. "It's zucchini" she said.

Oh bugger, I thought as I watched Eric frown and stare at his food. "No, it's not" he said. "I don't like zucchini."

Pam frowned and I noticed that it made her look even more like Eric than she normally did. I wondered idly if I should butt in about now, but decided against it. Maybe they'd just argue with each other and leave me out of it?

I could hope.

"It is!" Pam said indignantly. "I read it. In the cookbook. When I was making the salad. It is zucchini because Sam said it was."

Sam looked up and stopped shovelling potato into his mouth. He shrugged. "It was on the page" he said, giving me an apologetic glance.

Well, it wasn't Sam's fault. It was the stupid bloody Australians and their stupid desire to be like stupid Americans. And their stupid Australian cookbooks. Why couldn't they call it courgette like the rest of the bloody normal world did?

"I told you!" Pam said. "I can read now, and I _read_ it!"

"Well, actually I read it" Sam mumbled, and then he went back to eating.

Eric turned his head from Sam and Pam to me. Slowly. I didn't think it was good that it was so slow and I wondered what crisis I could invent in the kitchen. I wished I'd made dessert and that I had something in the oven I could go and check on. Why hadn't I made a freaking dessert?

"So…you couldn't get zucchini?" Eric asked me. "Here?"

"Um…" I said. "Well…" I stalled, and then I realised that I really had to cut my losses. I'd had a good run, after all. Ten and a half years or thereabouts. "Actually" I said. "They're the same thing. We just call them something different. It's like capsicums."

"Oh" Eric said, and then he looked down at his plate. "But I don't like zucchini" he said, pushing them around on his plate.

"I don't like them either!" Tray said, sensing that Eric was possibly about to get away with not eating one of the vegetables. Yeah, that was the least of my problems.

EPOV

I'd always wondered where the hell all the zucchinis had gone in this country. Sure, they had those courgettes, which I'd always figured were some kind of weird relation to the zucchini, but I hadn't ever really got to the bottom of where the zucchini went in the first place.

Although I had to admit, I probably hadn't spent that much time pondering it. Maybe only once or twice. But it was OK, because I didn't like zucchini and Sookie knew I didn't like zucchini and therefore I didn't have to worry.

Except apparently I'd been eating it all along.

"What's wrong?" Pam asked, loudly.

Amelia sighed. "Daddy wasn't supposed to know that one" she said. Felicia nodded along. Fucking fantastic. They were all fucking in on it.

"So was it a secret, or just something he hadn't been told yet? Because secrets are mean, but things you haven't been told yet are…are…well they're just things Mum hasn't told you yet. What was this?" Pam asked, and she looked around waiting for the answer. I was kind of interested in that one too.

"It was um…bit of both…" Sookie said, quietly, between mouthfuls of her own dinner. Yeah, fuck. _She _didn't mind zucchinis, did she? Or courgettes. Or whatever the fuck they were. Fuck. Did she really think I would never find out? Or was she paying the kids off to keep it from me? I didn't fucking know. But I felt kind of…betrayed. Or something.

I looked down at my plate. I'd been enjoying my dinner up until now. It wasn't made from fucking minced beef for a start. But that was when I thought I was eating courgettes. Now that I was faced with a plate full of zucchini it looked a bit less appetising.

I really fucking didn't like zucchini.

I ate the chicken, and the tomatoes. I ate the beans, and, at Pam's insistence, I had seconds of the salad. I may have left the zucchini on the side of the plate. I mean, it wasn't that bad, but it was the principle of the thing, after all.

Pam was kind of right. Secrets weren't fucking good. And as bad as I felt about the way Sookie was looking at me, and watching me leave the fucking zucchini on the plate I felt kind of justified. I hadn't started this after all.

After dinner Sookie stopped looking at me altogether and buried herself in cleaning dishes and making lunches and I just left her to it. If she was pissed, then I was more pissed, because, fuck, I was the wronged party.

Yep, pretty sure it was justified.

I took the boys and Ivan for a walk. I was never sure who got the most benefit, Ivan or the kids who had to go to sleep. Tray had to be persuaded not to bring the gun he'd made for himself. I really didn't need to have to explain any shootings to any of the neighbours.

Sam was quiet for the first part of the walk and then eventually, as I was trying to get Tray to climb off someone's front wall, he said "I don't think it makes that much difference."

"What doesn't?" I asked. "Tray, just fucking jump down before you fall into their garden."

"Nah, I'm good" Tray said.

"Whether it's courgettes…or whatever. It still tastes the same" Sam said, bending over to pat Ivan.

Tray jumped down with a thud, and proceeded to perform some kind of roll along the ground as though he'd jumped from an even greater height and was now keeping low to avoid the enemy. I stepped over him. Some things were best ignored.

"It's just…it's the principle of the thing. The fact that Sookie's been telling me for fucking years that we weren't eating zucchinis, we were eating courgettes."

"Well we were" Sam said. "No one calls them zucchinis here."

"What's a zucchini?" Tray asked, as he ran to catch up to us. I bent down to let Ivan off the leash. Sure, it wasn't strictly legal but at this time of night, in the dark, in winter there wasn't exactly a fuck-load of people around to report us.

And I could always say he'd got away from me anyway.

"Courgette" Sam answered.

"Really?" Tray asked. "I don't like courgettes."

"Yes you do" I said to him, but he'd run off again, with Ivan running along behind him. I was about eighty per cent confident that one of them would remember to turn the corner when they got to it.

Sam sighed. "I like Mum's cooking" he said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "Me too." The cooking wasn't the problem, though. It was the fucking ingredients. "Left, Tray!" I yelled. "Other left!"

SPOV

I felt horrible about the whole zucchini debacle. Really horrible. And I knew I only had myself to blame, although I couldn't help but feel that if Pam had just kept her mouth shut a tiny bit it might have helped. Maybe she could have learned to read next year or something?

But who was I kidding? I still wouldn't have told Eric if I'd had another year. Not after all this time. It wasn't so much that I thought I'd got away with it…well, maybe I did. But I'd considered it a non-issue. I thought it wasn't a big deal. I thought that Eric knew and had decided to play along. I'd obviously been wrong, because from the way he'd been sighing and pushing his courgettes around and giving me dirty looks during dinner, he clearly wasn't playing along.

He was kind of pissed off at me.

But I couldn't really dwell on it, because after I'd cleaned up dinner I had to get Pam into bed. And she wanted to move on from the correct name for zucchini to menstrual cramps. Boy, she picked the best stuff to talk about.

EPOV

I didn't see Sookie for a while when I got back from the walk. I talked the boys into actually going to bed and that took a while, and Tray got attacked by Stan on the way from the bathroom to their bedroom which meant he let out a string of curse words. "Bugger, bollocks, arse, crap!" he yelled.

Fuck. None of that had come from me. No wonder they all went along with Sookie's idea that the fucking things were courgettes.

"Knock it off, Tray" I said. "And get to bed."

"But I'm bleeding!" he yelled back.

"You're fine." Fuck, they all wanted Band-Aids for every fucking thing.

Tray walked in, kind of swiping at his leg and climbed into bed. "Night, guys" I said to them.

"Night" Tray said, and then he sat up and examined his leg again. "Is Mum gonna be annoyed if there's blood on the sheets?" he asked. Yeah, he was bleeding. But it would stop. Soon. Probably. It was only a scratch, after all.

"I hope not" Sam muttered. "I don't like it when Mum's upset." He sighed, and rolled over, trying to make his pillow more comfortable. Tray shrugged and got under the covers and lay down, before picking a piece of Lego off the floor and throwing it at Sam.

"No more of that" I said, and then I left to the sound of them both saying goodnight. Yeah, I had to fucking admit that I didn't like it when Sookie was upset either.

But this was totally not my fault. She only had herself to blame.

She was in the kitchen cleaning that oven she loved so fucking much when I went in there, and she glanced up at me, and then back down again quickly. We were silent for a while, the only sound Sookie's cloth moving over the surface of the elements. "So, uh…do you want me to make you coffee?" she asked quietly, after a while. She stood up and moved over to the sink to rinse out the cloth.

I figured this was her way to apologise, but from the way she was glancing nervously at the coffee maker I was fucking worried that I'd end up with that shit she made from a packet. No fucking way was that going to make me feel any better.

"It's OK" I said. "I'll make it." I started to get the cups and the coffee beans out and turned the machine on. Sookie disappeared into the pantry and didn't come out for a while. When she did she was holding a container. I hoped she wasn't going to make me eat more fucking zucchini to prove I really did like it, because I didn't. Not a bit.

Although sometimes the courgettes had been OK.

Instead she took out some plates and when I sat down at the table with our coffees, she put some of that ginger crunch slice she liked to make in front of me. Three pieces to be exact. That was one more than I usually got.

She was clearly feeling pretty shitty about this whole thing and keen to make amends. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all.

We drank our coffee and made small talk. Sookie talked about her conversation with Pam at bedtime, and Pam's horror of menstrual cramps. Yeah, I was kind of with Pam on that one. It sounded pretty horrific. I talked about work and the presentation I had to make the next day and how I hoped it was going to work out. And at some point, Sookie ended up standing behind me, giving me a scalp massage.

Yeah, this guilt thing wasn't fucking half-bad. I kind of felt like it was the least I was due really. It had been a long fucking time coming, but I'd finally weeded out the last of Sookie's secrets. Well, I hoped it was the last.

Pam was right. Secrets were shitty.

The scalp massage turned into a shoulder massage as well, which was pretty fucking awesome. I wondered how much further her guilt was going to take her and whether we'd get to blow-jobs because that could be fucking relaxing too. Although I figured it would maybe spoil the mood if I actually suggested it.

Would it?

Yeah, it would I decided. Really it needed to be something Sookie offered as a gesture of remorse. Then it would be OK.

But then the mood got spoilt anyway, because I turned around and I looked at Sookie and she looked fucking sad. Sad and miserable and kind of…well, kind of like she wanted to please me really. Like she really wanted me to say it was OK and it didn't really matter.

And it didn't. It was only a fucking vegetable. And it was OK when Sookie cooked it anyway. I hadn't liked it when that bitch Dad brought home when I was 12 tried to make me fucking eat it. Marian, or whatever the fuck her name had been. She'd been one of the less pleasant ones we'd had around, at least when Dad wasn't there to see her. But I was OK with Sookie serving it. Sam was right. Her food was good. And I liked it when she cooked for me.

I just wanted Sookie to be happy. And be back to normal. And stop looking at me like I might explode if she didn't cater to my every whim.

Well, maybe I'd regret stopping that one later on, but at that point in time, I didn't want to have her follow me around trying to make everything OK. I just wanted her back.

"It's OK" I said. "I mean…I kind of wish you'd told me. And not Pam. But it's OK."

"You're not still mad?" Sookie asked, looking at me closely.

"Not mad, really" I said. "I was never that mad…just, well. Just fucking surprised, I guess. I really thought they were different things."

Sookie looked like she was suppressing a smile. "I guess that's because you didn't spend your childhood surrounded by them and eating courgette surprise" she said. "Mum used to grow them, and then we'd be inundated and she'd run out of ideas, and then it would be courgette surprise again."

"What was the surprise?" I asked.

"That it was courgette. Again, I think" Sookie said, laughing. "Jason used to hate eating them, but I never minded. Dad had a rule though, that you ate what you were given, so Jason just had to lump it."

I pulled Sookie down into my lap and held her close. "I guess…well, I don't remember rules. I just remember one of Dad's girlfriends did this thing with zucchini that I hated and she got really pissed if I didn't eat it. But Dad didn't care…or wasn't there…so I wasn't fucking doing anything to please her." Maybe it had just started as a way to show I was in fucking charge and she wasn't. None of them were. I hated the way they thought they could order me around, tell me what to do, act like my mother. They weren't my fucking mother. They were just cheap women who couldn't do better than a fucking old drunk who didn't even care about them.

Maybe I had liked zucchini all along. Or maybe I just liked the courgettes that Sookie cooked. For me. Because she loved me. And not just because she was scared that I might be angry with her.

"I should probably be setting a good example for Tray" I said. "He needs fucking rules."

"Yep" Sookie agreed. "They all do."

"So it's fine. Absolutely fine. I think I do like courgette after all. It's probably different here, anyway."

"Probably" Sookie said, and she laughed, and she kissed me, and it was nice that we were good again. I liked it when she was happy. There was always the chance there still might be a blow-job on the cards. But even if there wasn't, that was OK too. I still felt pretty good about the whole thing. Letting go was great.

And that feeling lasted right about until I got a phone call the next morning. I really wish she hadn't fucking called me.

**A/N Pamol is liquid paracetamol, so painkiller for kids.**

**Eric's knife-block is the Voodoo knifeblock. www (dot) voodooknifeblock (dot) com (dot) au**

**Thanks for reading!**


	23. Chapter 23

**A/N And on with the show before the cat realises that the toddler has given him imaginary cat food...**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I'd just sat down with my coffee with the intention of going over the presentation before I had to show it to my potential client later that morning. For some reason these things were always scheduled for right before lunch time which usually meant the clients expected me to take them out for a huge, expensive lunch. That wasn't happening. I might have been doing OK working by myself, but it wasn't like it was in the days when I had Victor's fucking entertainment budget to blow.

I kind of missed those days. Sometimes.

Plus, Sookie had made me sandwiches. Probably still spurred on by some guilt about the fact she'd been serving me zucchini for years and hiding it from me. Well, not explicitly telling me anyway. But I wasn't going to refuse the sandwiches, because that would just be cruel. Not to mention the fact she'd actually remembered that I like mayo in ham sandwiches for once, and she hadn't just given me that tomato chutney stuff she likes. So she was clearly still feeling guilty, and would have been hurt if I said I didn't want them.

I wondered what I was getting for dinner.

Although I'd eaten the sandwiches now and it wasn't exactly lunchtime. Maybe the clients would take me out for lunch instead?

And then the phone rang, just as I was opening up my PowerPoint presentation, which was fucking annoying, because I wanted to go over this now and not piss about with unimportant phone calls. I really needed a fucking receptionist but there wasn't really room for one in this office. And I'd have to pay another salary, only for answering the phone. I wondered how long until Amelia was old enough to come in and do it for free.

Although maybe it was important. I debated about letting it go to voicemail, but it might be the client with a change in time, or, worse, cancelling. And if they were going to cancel, then I really needed to talk them out of it, because, fuck, I needed this contract just at the moment.

So I picked up the phone and hoped like hell it wasn't going to be anything that I couldn't deal with in a few minutes. After I said my name there was a pause, and then a woman spoke. "Eric? Is that…you're Stan's son?"

When she'd first begun talking I hadn't even registered the accent. Probably because she didn't really have one. But fuck, this had to be Dad's latest girlfriend. Fan-fucking-tastic.

I should have let it go to fucking voicemail.

"Yep" I said, hoping she'd just spit it out and let me get on with my life, I really hoped this wasn't going to be a long drawn-out exchange of pleasantries.

"He's in hospital" she said, clearly feeling the same way I did about the small talk.

"Uh-huh" I said. "Well, give him my best." I went to disconnect the phone, but the woman on the other end, made an impatient noise and I stopped.

"It's not good. You need to be there" she said.

No I fucking didn't. I needed to be going over my presentation, and then I needed to be at the company's office in Fanshawe Street in the city. I did not need to be on the other side of the world because Dad had fucking drunk too much again and his body was too old to take it. Fuck, by the time I got there he would have detoxed and been discharged, and then she could fucking take care of him.

Unless she was taking the opportunity to run out on him while he was hospitalised. Fuck her. I wasn't going back there to tell him she'd cleared out the liquor cabinet and moved to fucking San Francisco. I'd done that shit before and I wasn't doing it again. No, she could deal with it.

"Is this…uh…" Fuck. What the fuck was her name? Tracey? Trina? Trixie? "Trudi?" I asked.

"No" she said, sounding quite snippy about it. How the fuck was I supposed to know that Dad had someone else there now? I didn't know quite why she was so pissed at me. "It's not important who I am, Eric, the fact of the matter is you should be here."

Well, fuck her. I wasn't answering to her, and she had no fucking right to order me around, that was for fucking sure. And fine, she thought she could act all high and fucking mighty because she knew my name and I didn't know who the fuck she was, but it wasn't going to get her jack shit.

He was still her problem. I wasn't there.

"I don't have to be anywhere, other than at an appointment, lady. And after that, I need to be home with my family. Who are here, with me. Not there. In some fucking hospital bed because they can't fucking stay dry for more than two days. He can fuck off."

"How can you be so uncaring?" she asked coldly.

"You know nothing about my father and me" I answered, probably just as coldly. This woman seriously fucked me off like no one else. Fuck. Dad probably wouldn't be upset if she left him while he was out of the house. He'd probably suggested she call me so I could be there to help her move her shit out of the place.

Yep, that'd be just like him. Get me to do his fucking dirty work. He'd probably already lined up one of the nurses to move in next. So fuck it. He could sort that shit out.

"I know he's dying" she said, probably for fucking dramatic effect. But I wasn't buying that bullshit.

"He's been killing his liver off for fucking years" I said. "But somehow, he's still fucking with us."

"This is his heart, Eric" the bitch on the phone said. "He had a heart attack."

Well, that at least was new. And here I thought Dad didn't surprise me anymore. "So he'll get better" I said. "People do. These days."

"It's not the first. The doctors aren't confident it won't happen again. Soon."

"So…what?" I asked. "I'm supposed to go over there and sit by his bedside and wait for him to fucking die?" I couldn't quite see how this fell on my shoulders. She was there. She could do it. He hadn't fucking spent years trying to ruin her life, after all. Well, not as many years as he'd spent trying to ruin mine.

Or maybe he hadn't even been trying to ruin it. Maybe that implied he actually fucking cared enough to do that. Mostly…mostly he'd just fucking wished I wasn't there.

So I really fucking wasn't signing up to be there now. Not for him. Not when I had a family I'd have to leave. Not for all the fucking money in the world.

"Thanks for letting me know…" I said, but that fucking woman interrupted me again before I could say goodbye.

"But you're not coming? You're going to let him die alone?"

"I'm not letting him do anything. I'm just trying to live my life far away from him. He's…fuck. He's fucking toxic."

"He is fucking dying, Eric."

"Still not my problem" I said.

"Well" she said. "I think it's pretty obvious you have more in common with your father than you think, Eric."

"Don't you fucking compare me to him…" I said, but she'd hung up. Of course she had to fucking get the last word in. Bitch. Probably she was pissed that she was stuck with him.

Well, they fucking deserved each other, that was for sure. I was keeping out of the whole fucking mess.

But my mood had soured completely by that time. How dare she fucking call me. Did he know? Had he put her up to this? Was this all just some way to show her what a fucking shit I was and how he had such a fucking shitty life? Well, fuck him. He could pull the poor deserted father act all he fucking wanted, but I didn't owe him shit.

So no way was I rushing to his bedside. He could fuck off if he thought that.

I didn't owe him anything and he had no power over me anymore. Absolutely no fucking power. At all.

I read through the presentation again, although my mind wasn't really on it. Fuck. If I didn't get this contract I'd know who to fucking blame and it wouldn't be me.

I saved everything off and left the office and drove into the city. It was a shitty drive and I nearly collided with a fucking bus that thought it owned the road and didn't believe that buses belonged in the fucking bus lane, and then I got stuck in road works on Customs Street, near the building where I first met Sookie.

The bank had long ago moved to new headquarters, so I didn't go in there anymore. I had always liked the view from it. It was fucking better than staring at the tail lights of the car in front. And my watch.

Fuck, I was going to be late.

Eventually the road crew managed to pull their fingers out of their asses and actually move the dump truck or whatever the fuck it was that was blocking the flow of traffic and we could get moving again. Assholes. Every fucking five minutes they decided to dig up the fucking roads to lay new cable, or other shit. If the fucking telecoms companies just got their fucking act together then all this would have been finished years ago. But no. They all did it separately, or the council decided to change the road layout, or they wanted to extend the motorway and needed new lanes. Fuck. They didn't think about how it impacted me, did they? Well, everyone. But it was me who was getting the impact today.

Fuckers.

Thankfully the traffic sped up after that and I managed to locate a parking building that wasn't too far from the office I was visiting, so I was maybe five minutes late in the end. This would have been OK, except that the clients weren't ready for me, and I had to sit on a fucking uncomfortable chair in their reception area for fifteen minutes while the receptionist kept trying to fucking talk to me. I didn't want to talk to her. If I wanted to talk to a receptionist, I'd fucking hire one myself.

And then eventually it was time for the presentation. The guys I was seeing were part of a software company who had created a programme banks could use to track customer leads and they were looking to expand into the States. Only when I finished my presentation I wasn't entirely sure from the questions they were asking me whether they really got the point of consulting and that I was being engaged to help them formulate strategies to find clients, not to actually go out and find their fucking clients for them while they sat at their desks and updated their fucking Facebook status.

Thankfully their senior manager turned up and he seemed to have more of a fucking clue about the way things worked because, whether I needed the contract or not, I wasn't really in the mood for dealing with a bunch of retarded fuckers who didn't have a clue. Not after the drive in here and those fucking road works.

But there was a bright spot when the senior guy took us for lunch at the yum cha restaurant around the corner. So at least something good came out of the whole fucking experience, and with any luck, I would get the contract and that would keep me busy for the next few weeks.

Too busy to go to the States, anyway.

Not that I was fucking was, of course.

I'd been back at my office for about an hour when another call came through. This time she didn't even bother saying hello, just fucking announced "Your father's had another heart attack."

Yep, course he had. I wondered what the chances were of him being able to fake it, in a hospital, surrounded by doctors. It'd be tricky, but he probably could do it. No doubt he'd heard what my answer was and this was his reply. But could he pick up the fucking phone himself? Nope. Why do that when he thought I'd do his bidding no matter what.

Well he knew fucking nothing about me. That hadn't changed.

"Uh-huh" I replied. "And is he dead yet?"

There was silence on the other end for a moment and I thought the answer might actually be yes, and I held my breath. Probably at the anticipation of finally being free of the bastard. But then she spoke. "No. But it's not good. You should be here, Eric. That's all I called to say."

"No, _you're _there" I said. "I'm here and I shouldn't be anywhere else. You deal with it; tell him it's fine, hold his hand, sneak him whisky. Fuck, it's not my problem."

"Well it is not my problem either, Eric" she said, sounding thoroughly pissed with me. Fuck, she was an annoying bitch with an attitude. Obviously thought she was better than the rest of us and I had to admit that she certainly sounded more together than a lot of the women he'd had recently. The ones I'd known about, anyway. They'd tended to come from the down-trodden and desperate end of the scale, whereas this woman sounded…fuck, I didn't know. Like she was fucking used to bossing other people around, that's for fucking sure. Maybe she was a teacher or something?

And when I thought about it there was something about her voice that was a little familiar. Maybe she'd been one of my teachers? Or maybe she'd just been one of Dad's women a while ago and he'd gone crawling back to her? No wonder she was fucked off.

Well, I was fucked off too. She could fucking join the club.

"I am not flying over there to see him and I do not understand what I have to say to you to make you comprehend that. You seem to have some kind of mental deficiency" I hissed into the phone.

"And you seem to be missing some level of basic human decency, Eric. He is your father."

"He was a shitty father. He was the worst fucking father I could have had and I have hated every minute I have had to spend in his presence. I am not signing up to spend more time with him now."

That seemed to calm her down somewhat, as she paused, which was good, because I was fucking angry and if she'd decided to tell me again that he was my father and I owed him I really wasn't sure what I would have said to her.

But I was pretty sure I'd be hanging up on her straight after.

Instead she sighed and her voice, when she spoke, sounded warmer…or something. She'd lost some of the bitchiness anyway. "Eric" she said. "I realise things were…tough, with Stan, and it's not my place to push you into reconciling with him. But this is it. This is his time to go, and I'd hate to think you'd regret not being here when it happens. Regrets are…" she paused, and I waited. "Hopefully you won't have to find out" she said quietly. "I think you'd better talk to his doctor."

Before I could say anything I heard the sound of her heels clicking and then the phone must have been passed to the guy who was in charge of fixing Dad.

Or helping him to die, I realised after I'd spoken to him for a while. Fuck. She was right all along. Apparently people who were heavy users of alcohol, as the doctor put it, were prone to heart problems. And they usually couldn't fix them.

But that still didn't mean I had to be there.

I thanked the doctor and disconnected the call and then stared at the wall for a while. I figured that I couldn't exactly put another desk in here for a receptionist but maybe if I took the office next door that had been empty for a few months then maybe I could talk to the landlord about knocking through to make one combined space. I was sure he'd see my point, after all, I'd been a tenant here for nearly ten years now and that had to count for something, didn't it? That history. Yeah, so then I could look at getting a receptionist. Or maybe Amelia could do it as a trial, because the school break was about to come up again and I didn't believe for a minute that she really had that much school work to do. It would do her good to come in and find out what work was all about. And she wouldn't mind helping me out, I was sure of it.

But did I really want my clients finding out every detail of my private life? That was the question I'd have to think about.

And I had a lot to think about, what with the questions from the presentation I'd done that morning and the other work I had on. I just couldn't seem to settle on any of it, though. Fuck, that fucking woman had fucked up my day.

I decided I needed coffee. Maybe some fresh air. I left the office again and walked up to the stores at the Mt Eden Village. I could get coffee and just…clear my head. Try to focus.

Maybe, I thought, maybe I could buy Sookie a present? Something to say that she didn't need to feel guilty about the fucking courgettes anymore. That might be a nice gesture and show that I was pretty OK with what happened. And I was, because I'd eaten it all, hadn't I? So I really only had myself to blame in a way. And I didn't want to let her think that I didn't appreciate her cooking, because, fuck knows, I really did. I really liked her cooking. And I really liked her. So a present would make it all OK.

Except that when I looked in a couple of the stores I couldn't think of anything she really needed. The bookstore was crammed with stuff but how in the fuck would I know what shitty romance book she wanted to read next, and I had a feeling this store didn't even sell shitty romances.

I went next door to the store that sold gifts and things for the home, but that had nothing either. She probably didn't need anything else for the kitchen anyway.

So in the end I drifted into the candy store and bought some of the candy from the States that kind of reminded me of my childhood. The good bits of it anyway. The few good bits of it. Not the shitty stuff. There was too much shitty stuff and one of the things I liked about living here was that there were very few reminders of all of it. No, it was tucked away on the other side of the fucking world and I didn't have to face it on a daily basis.

But just occasionally, I could eat the candy.

As I came out I realised that school must have finished for the day and the street suddenly seemed littered with kids in uniforms. See, nothing like home where only the slutty girls ended up in school uniforms. Well, the ones we thought were slutty anyway. Here the uniforms weren't slutty in the slightest.

Although had Amelia's skirt always been that short? "Hello" I said, as I walked up behind her while she stood on the corner. She whirled around. "Oh" she said. "You're here."

"Yep" I confirmed. I offered her the bag of candy. "Want some?"

She looked at it dubiously. "Not really" she said. "And you better put that away before you get arrested."

"Ha fucking ha" I said. "Come on, I'll buy you coffee." I figured that would be a nice gesture. I'd buy her coffee and then we'd go back to the office and I'd give her a ride home and I'd have scored my dad-points with her for the day and when I needed her to answer the phones, she wouldn't have an out.

Except that she screwed up her face and looked less than enthusiastic. "Um…I'm meeting someone…" she said, staring past me. I turned around and Riley practically shit himself as I did so. Fucking fantastic. I'd been thrown over for a fucking kid.

"Well, he can come too" I said, nodding at Riley and ignoring the fact that Riley looked shit-scared at the idea. Fuck, I didn't know what I'd done to him.

Amelia sighed, and rolled her eyes. "It doesn't work like that" she said.

"What doesn't?" I asked her.

"My life!" she said, like I was a fucking imbecile. Well, fuck. She could fucking have her life then, and I'd carry on with mine.

"OK" I said. "I'll see you at home. Don't be late."

"Yeah, yeah. Of course…" Amelia said, suddenly giving me the sweetest smile she could manage. "You could still shout the coffees?"

"Could I really?" I asked her, and she nodded and did an amazingly good impression of Pam when she wanted something. Or maybe it was the other way around. Fuck knows, Amelia had taught Pam enough stuff over the years.

I pulled out my wallet and handed over some cash. Riley carefully edged around me and went to stand behind Amelia as though he thought she'd shield him. Possibly she would.

Fuck, that was a scary thought. Surely you picked your family over everyone else? Well, if they fucking deserved it anyway.

But I did. I fucking deserved it, and Amelia had the fucking twenty dollars now to prove it. I watched as they walked off, Riley's hand sneaking into Amelia's when he thought they were far enough away not to be seen, and then they disappeared into a café.

And I was alone on the sidewalk again.

I stopped at another café further down the block and bought a coffee to take back to the office, but I only drank half of it. I still couldn't concentrate on much. Fucking waste of a day this was.

If only I could go back and just erase the whole fucking thing that would be great.

That was what drinking used to be fucking good for. For just forgetting. I thought about the bars I'd passed on my walk back from the village.

No. I wasn't that desperate. Not yet.

So I gave up on working and drove home to find Sookie and the other kids in the midst of the usual pre-dinner mayhem. I was kind of glad of the noise.

Sookie sent me off to have a chat with Tray about using the gun he'd made on his siblings. "Honestly" she said, throwing her hands up in the air. "I whacked Jason with one of his guns and knocked him out cold, so he'll only have himself to blame if the same thing happens to him. I wouldn't blame Felicia or Pam for retaliating."

"You knocked Uncle Jase out?" Sam asked.

"Yeah, he was unconscious" Sookie said, opening the oven and bending down to have a look. I looked too. Lasagne. It wasn't the worst thing she could make, but I figured it wasn't exactly a meal created to get rid of any guilt Sookie might still be feeling. Obviously, she'd moved on.

And that was good because so had I.

Sam, though, was still stuck on Jason's downfall at the hands of his sister. "But…that's not right" he said. "How did you do it?"

"I said. With the gun. He came around the corner and I just clonked him with it."

"Did you get in trouble?" Sam asked.

"Um…probably. But not too much. I think Dad knew what Jason was like." Sookie checked on something in the microwave. Beans. Same as the night before. Well, that was OK too.

Sam frowned. "Pam's not going to do that…is she?" he asked, but Sookie ignored him. Or didn't hear him, possibly, as she'd walked into the pantry.

I shrugged. "Not if she doesn't get hold of the gun" I said, and then I went to talk to Tray and warn him not to antagonise his siblings because there would be repercussions and I was probably not the one he had to worry about because chances were that Sookie was at that moment giving self-defence lessons to Pam and fuck knows, Pam never gave up on any fucking thing. And if he ended up in a four against one situation, then I really didn't like his odds.

So hopefully he got it. I didn't want to be too harsh with him because, fuck. At the end of the day I was fucking impressed he could make the thing in the first place. And I felt, well, slightly bad about the fact that I hadn't been the one to tell him how to do it, because I fucking couldn't. That wasn't something I was good at. And no one had ever fucking taught me stuff like that. Dad could have, because he could make all sorts of shit if he put his mind to it and there'd been times growing up, times when he was obviously lonely and wanted a friend…times when he was drunk, anyway, when he'd promised me stuff. But none of it had ever fucking happened.

Because my dad didn't fucking keep his promises. Not the ones to me, anyway.

So hopefully Tray got it. That I was kind of proud of him, as long as he didn't maim a sibling or a pet or anyone we knew and liked. Proud that he'd persevere long enough to get it made and to get its accuracy so fucking high.

Dinner was only notable for the funny shade of purple Amelia turned prior to her exploding in indignation when Felicia suggested she'd spent all afternoon kissing Riley. At least I hoped that's what snogging meant.

I also hoped that's what she hadn't been doing in that café. I tried to remember how dark it was in the back room of the place and I thought that it was dark, but maybe not dingy enough for public displays of affection.

Unless you were 14 and horny. Fuck. Sookie might have to talk to her again.

Sookie wanted to talk to me after dinner though. Well, after dinner and reading a story about a fairy to Pam, and wrestling the boys into bed. Literally wrestling them, because they decided that was a much better activity than going to fucking sleep. And it was kind of fun, I had to admit. They were lucky that they had each other and even if I wasn't here there was still someone to do this with, even if he was a sometimes less than willing participant.

But I think they liked it more when I was involved, and I think they'd be fucked off with me if I missed too many nights.

"Are you OK?" she asked, when I walked back into the kitchen.

"Yeah" I said, as I put some beans in the coffee machine. I liked these ones. I needed to remember to tell Sookie to get some more.

"It's just, um. Well, I'm sorry about the courgettes…still. I mean, I should have said. But it was so nice that you ate everything, and I got kind of spoiled. I was used to Bill and his enormous lists of foods he wouldn't touch, and if you'd said the first time I said it was courgette that you didn't like it, I wouldn't have used it again, but you didn't and you kept on eating it and it wasn't until later you mentioned the whole thing about not liking zucchini, so I just said it was courgette. Which it is, because, you know, it's from here and stuff. Are you even listening?"

I turned to the side and Sookie was staring at me. "Yeah" I said. "You're sorry about the courgettes. And it's fine, it really is. We all do stuff to, um, make our lives easier…"

"Well it wasn't just about _easy_" Sookie said, a bit indignantly. "It was…"

"It doesn't matter" I said, cutting her off. With a hug. It's harder for her to talk if I just squash her against me.

"You sure?" she asked. I think. She was kind of muffled.

"Yep" I said. "I am sure." I was sure. It didn't matter. I'd let it go. I kissed the top of her head and released her. "So have you got any more of that ginger crunch stuff?"

After the coffee Sookie finished up her chores and I read for a bit, although I gave up on that and went to help Sookie with the laundry. She said I wasn't much help though, and grumbled about me trying to hold her, and point blank refused to switch the dryer on until I left the laundry room first, but that was OK. It was better when it was the two of us, hanging out.

I'd had enough of my own fucking company to last a lifetime.

Amelia shouted at me when I tried to tell her to switch off her laptop and go to sleep, and then Felicia came into the room and yelled at Amelia for waking her up and thinking everything was always about her. I seriously doubted that Felicia had actually been asleep yet, as I was pretty sure I'd heard her using her own laptop not that long before, but I told the pair of them to fuck up, lie down, and go to fucking sleep. I think that worked.

They'd be fucked if I wasn't here to sort it out for them.

When I got into bed with Sookie she was already lying on her side facing away from me. She smelt nice, and so did the bed.

"Fresh sheets?" I asked, as I slid closer to her.

"Mmm-hmm" she said. "I changed ours and then I'll do everyone else's tomorrow."

"Fresh sheets make me horny" I whispered, kissing her neck and squeezing one of her boobs.

"Everything makes you horny, Eric" she whispered back, and I could hear the amusement in her voice, as she put her hand over mine. My name sounded so much better when she said it than when that bitch had been trying to order me around on the phone earlier. Maybe it was the accent? Or the chance of sex, anyway.

"You make me horny" I said. It was true. Fuck, I'd been quite keen on sex earlier in the evening when it was just Sookie, me and the dryer but this would be better. And it would make Sookie feel better too, and show her that I wasn't holding a grudge about the fucking courgettes.

I wasn't even thinking about them anymore.

Mostly I was thinking about Sookie, and about what I was going to do with Sookie, and that blotted everything out of my mind quite effectively. And bringing Sookie to orgasm with my mouth filled up quite a few of my other senses too. Nothing but Sookie. She was the most important thing in the world and I wanted to be here with her. Always. Because she loved me, despite the fact I'd arrived fucking broken and hardly much of a fucking prize. Despite the fact she'd already been left by almost everyone she ever loved and it was almost too much for her to risk that again. I think I knew now, more than I did then, what she'd risked. For me.

She'd given me so much. And she'd never asked for anything. I'd do so much for her. Go anywhere she asked; be there for her when she needed me. I loved her, and I owed her everything.

I owed him fucking nothing.

But even after sex, after losing myself in Sookie, I couldn't sleep. I lay there, and I held her in my arms and I knew that if I didn't say something it would be fucking worse.

Even Pam knew that secrets were shitty.

"I had a call today" I said, quietly, in case she really was asleep.

"Mmm?" she said, and I knew there was no getting out of it now.

"Some chick of my dad's. He's in hospital. It's his heart, and it's bad. They expect it'll kill him. Soon."

Sookie rolled over to face me and I wished I could see her more clearly, but there wasn't a lot of moonlight around that night. It was black as fucking pitch. As black as the big hole inside of me that was slowly opening up the more I thought about it. The big black emptiness that I thought was going to swallow me whole any fucking moment.

"Oh" Sookie said. "That's awful. You'll have to go over there." She put her hand on my cheek and I turned and kissed her wrist.

"I know."

**Thanks for reading!**


	24. Chapter 24

**A/N Well I hope everyone is still enjoying this story. I'm still thrilled that you're all reading and keeping me company on this journey. Well, me and the toddler. Sometimes me and the toddler and the cat. Occasionally the cat from next door is here too, because he gets lonely. There was a spider earlier but I had to ask it to leave because it freaked the toddler out (I think she's secretly an Australian). But we're all happy to have you here!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I hated that Eric had to do this, hated that he had to go back there by himself and watch his father die. In some ways, I'd been spared that. My parents had gone suddenly and unexpectedly after all. Even with Gran I hadn't seen her final days; I'd been on honeymoon when she'd died and Aunty Linda had been there instead. And Bill…well, Bill's decline had been heart-breaking and painful, but I still hadn't expected him to die on me. And certainly not from a car crash.

So I had so far in my life escaped that kind of experience. But Eric wasn't going to be that lucky. I guessed being an only child really sucked at times like these and he probably regretted he didn't have a sister over in the States who he could assume would take care of it all.

Instead it was Eric. On his own. And I was really worried about him.

"Well…just. You know. Take care of yourself and be sensible…and stuff…" I said, as he was putting things into his suitcase. He looked up and stared at me. "I'm not Tray" he said, slightly indignantly.

"I know" I said, sitting on the bed next to the suitcase and having a sneaky look at what he'd packed to make sure the essential things had been included. Like underwear. It wasn't that I didn't trust him, but there had been an incident once before when there'd been annoyed text messages from the States about having to find a Wal-Mart as though it had been my fault.

So it wouldn't hurt to check.

Although Eric caught me checking and frowned at me. "I guess you'll be able to wash stuff when you're over there" I said, and that didn't make Eric look particularly thrilled.

"No underpants fairy" he said, folding a t-shirt and tossing it in. "Mmm. Washing kind of sucks" I said and I stretched my arms above my head, mainly so I wouldn't be tempted to re-fold the poor shirt. Sure, it was most likely full of holes and hanging by a thread but that didn't mean it couldn't at least start its journey not all crumpled up.

Eric watched what I was doing though, and I thought he could tell I was itching to repack all his stuff until I realised he was staring at my chest and I'd probably got away with it. "I will miss the underpants fairy for lots of reasons" he sighed.

And I really wished he didn't have to go because I was going to miss him too.

Eric sighed again, and shut the lid of the suitcase. There was a shout from outside as Tray and Sam did something I probably didn't want to know about. Eric did though, well, he moved over and looked out the door that led from our bedroom to the deck and assessed the situation.

"OK?" I asked, as I looked at the lid of the suitcase and wished for x-ray vision. I hadn't seen socks. Were there socks in there? How pissed off would Eric be if I questioned him about socks? How more pissed off would he be if he got to the States and didn't have any socks? How quickly could I ship socks across the Pacific Ocean?

Even an underpants fairy had her limits.

"Um…you did pack socks, didn't you?" I asked Eric.

"Yes" he said frowning at me and looking annoyed. Well, that was nothing new. He'd been looking annoyed now for a while. For the last two days, pretty much, as he'd organised everything for this trip. I'd barely seen him as he was on the phone trying to book flights, talk to his dad's doctors, and try to let clients know he wouldn't be around, but he was still available if they needed him.

I figured I'd have to get used to not seeing him. But it still kind of sucked.

There was another shout outside, but Eric didn't look this time. "So, you'll be OK, won't you?" he asked.

"Oh…I'll be fine" I said, wishing I'd done a better job with not being mopey. I was trying to be supportive, I really was. But I was used to having some time to prepare for Eric going away, two days was kind of short.

Eric nodded. "I'll have another word to Tray" he said. "Just remind him…about the gun, and not maiming people."

"Is that what they're doing out there?" I asked twisting around on the bed to look out the door. I couldn't see them, and I couldn't hear them now so it was probably OK.

"Well…Sam ran past before with Tray in pursuit, so I think so" Eric said, sounding unconcerned.

"I hope no one loses an eye" I said, realising that made me sound like a total killjoy, but I was Mum, and it came with the job description. I was pretty sure of that.

Eric shrugged.

"You're not as worried?" I asked.

"They're, um…mostly sensible" Eric said. "And Sam's pretty fast."

"So as long as he stays ahead of Tray they're OK?"

"Yep" Eric confirmed, looking around the room as though he was checking what he might have left behind. His eyes settled on me but I resisted the urge to say we should see if I could fit in the suitcase, not even as a joke. It would just make it all too sad. Instead I decided to stick with the subject of Tray and his gun.

"I'm still surprised he made it, by himself, from just a few verbal instructions" I said. "I mean, if I tell him to go and put shoes on he looks at me like I'm speaking a foreign language and just wanders off and ignores me. How come he can retain the instructions on how to make a rubber band gun?"

"Well they all do that, to an extent" Eric said. "I told Felicia not to leave her sweater in the car earlier and she ignored that."

"That's because that was a foreign language" I pointed out. "It's a cardigan for starters." I ignored Eric rolling his eyes at me. "But I still don't know how Tray did it. With the gun. It seems…I don't know. Quite an achievement really?" I screwed up my nose. I wasn't sure you were supposed to be proud of your kids' abilities in building weapons.

Eric nodded. I guessed we were then. "Yeah…" Eric said, slowly. "I was thinking the same thing. Maybe that's just his…specialty?" He shrugged. "Like he'd be good in prison or something."

"Prison?" I asked, wondering, not for the first time, how Eric's mind actually worked. I got the impression it wasn't wired at all like mine was.

"Yeah. You know, like having to make weapons and stuff. Could be useful." Eric wandered back over to the wardrobe and looked inside.

"So if you ever go to jail, I have to send Tray in to help you out?" I asked.

Eric came back out with something in his hand. "It doesn't necessarily have to be prison, Sookie" he said. "Maybe Tray's just useful anyway. Kind of like…a weapons specialist." He opened up the suitcase again and dumped a load of socks in without meeting my eyes. I knew I hadn't seen them in there before.

"Extra socks" Eric mumbled, and I let him have that one. I knew I was right. "You realise" I said to him, "That I didn't actually give birth to your own Special Ops team, don't you?"

Eric shrugged, and looked unconcerned. Maybe I had and I just hadn't realised it yet?

Pam came into the room "I finished!" she announced. "Daddy, you can have one of them, because they're very special cupcakes. And I only have six!" Yeah, that was a bit of an issue when there were seven people in the family. "So here you go, this one has a pink paper case." She thrust the cupcake into Eric's hand.

"Thanks, Pam" he said, looking at it. "Does it, uh…is that glitter on top?"

"It's special edible fairy dust!" Pam said excitedly. "Look! It's all sparkly and pink and it matches the icing and the cake and the paper because they're all pink too."

"Mmm" Eric said. "They are." He didn't look enthusiastic.

"So, go on" Pam urged. "Eat it."

"Well, maybe I'll just save it for later…" Eric said hopefully.

"But you won't be here later" Pam pointed out. "You can't eat it before dinner, because that would spoil dinner and after dinner we're going to the airport, although I don't get to go on the plane and I love planes." She paused, and sighed loudly. "So eat it now. Go on." She looked at Eric expectantly.

He peeled off the paper case and took a bite. "Um…very good Pam" he said. "Very, uh, pink…and sparkly. Kind of crunchy."

Pam beamed at Eric. "I know!" she said. "You can pack some, if you want?" she looked at the suitcase.

"They won't let me take food over there. Unfortunately" Eric said, eating the last bit of the cupcake, and not really sounding sincere. Luckily Pam missed that.

"Oh. Oh well. I'll make more when you come back then" Pam said brightly and then she left the room.

Eric pulled a face. "I don't know that fairies are that edible" he said. "That stuff is pretty disgusting. It's like eating crunchy chemicals."

"Mmm, it didn't look the best" I agreed. "But Pam was insistent that her cakes needed it."

"I'm not sure anyone needs edible fairy dust" Eric said. "It was probably something the world could have done without entirely."

"Probably" I agreed, and then we were both silent for a moment, contemplating what to say.

"I might go and see what the boys are doing" Eric said, looking out the door again.

I shrugged. "They went quiet" I said.

"Exactly" Eric agreed, and then he walked out of the room. I waited until I saw him walk down the steps of the deck through the bedroom door, and then I opened the suitcase again. I was just going to have a little look. Maybe a re-organise. Nothing too dramatic.

It seemed the least I could do really.

EPOV

Right now the thing I liked most about the kids was that they were selfish. Sometimes that was a bad thing, like when you had to explain to one of them that they weren't going to get their own way in everything and just because they wanted to watch some _Strawberry Shortcake _shit again didn't mean they had to subject their siblings, or me, to their shitty choice.

But right now the fact they were selfish little shits was actually working in my favour. Tray and Sam didn't care about my life and the fact I had to go to the States and sit beside my dad's bedside, at least not unless it affected them directly.

"That was an awesome goal I got this morning, eh Dad?" Tray asked, as he kicked the soccer ball to me.

"Yep" I agreed. "You both played really well." Sam looked at his feet. He hadn't scored, but then he was pretty solid at defence and he'd been holding his own.

"Next week I'm going to score even more goals" Tray boasted. "You watch."

"Dad won't be here next week" Sam pointed out, as he passed the ball to Tray.

"Really?" Tray asked. "You're staying for that long?"

"I don't know how long I'm staying for" I answered truthfully. I hoped he'd die quickly. Actually I hoped he'd die while on I was on the flight over there and I could say I'd tried, but I didn't make it in time, and I could just…fuck. I'd still have to organise the fucking funeral and sell the house and all of the other shit, but at least I wouldn't have to see Dad again. That'd be preferable.

"His dad's not well. He's dying" Sam said, and I got the impression he'd been over all of this with Sookie.

"Who?" Tray asked, kicking the ball again.

"His dad. Dad's dad" Sam said, after I passed to him.

Tray screwed his face up. "You have a dad?" he asked me.

"Yeah" I said. Well it was true for the moment, anyway. "You guys did meet him…once."

Tray shrugged. "Don't remember. Is he old? Is that why he's dying?"

"Something like that" I said to him.

"You're not old enough to die, though?" Tray asked me.

"Um…no" I said. I wasn't really sure there was an age limit but I didn't want to worry him.

Sam didn't have the same concerns though. "You don't have to be old to die" Sam said. "'Cos remember Amelia's always going on about how she had a dad, and he died in a car crash. I don't think he was that old." He nodded at me. Fuck, I hadn't even thought about that. Was I older now than Bill had been when he'd died? Yeah I was. That was fucking scary.

"You can get new dads?" Tray asked, sounding interested.

"No" I said to him. "You can't just order a new one off the internet, so don't think you're getting someone who will let you get a fucking shotgun." He'd asked earlier because apparently Tama had said he had a real gun for pig hunting and Tray was fucking impressed. I thought the rest of the family who were still wary of the rubber band gun would be fucking less than impressed with actual weaponry.

"They have to die first" Sam said, matter-of-factly. "And then you get a new one. Well…I think Mum picks." He shrugged.

Tray mulled that over, and then he turned to me. "So…you'll get a new one? If your dad dies?"

"Nope" I said. There was no one around to pick a new one for me. Thank fuck for that. Because she'd made a shitty choice the first time around.

"So how come we got a new one then?" Tray asked.

Sam sighed, and looked at his brother like he belonged in the special class. "_We_ didn't" he said. "Amelia did." I considered pointing out that Felicia had as well, but thought fuck it. Felicia didn't exactly bring it up like Amelia did and they were confused enough already. Well, Tray was.

Tray shrugged. "She gets everything first" he grumbled. "_And_ she gets to sit in the front of the car. When can I sit in the front of the car?"

"When you're tall enough not to be decapitated by an airbag" I said to him.

"What's that?" Tray asked.

"Have your head taken off" I explained.

"Like straight off at the neck and all the blood spurts out and you die" Sam said, warming to his subject.

"Cool" Tray said, and he kicked the ball to me again. "Is that what happened to the dad Amelia used to have?"

"I don't know" I said. I didn't know any details of Bill's accident, and I didn't really want to. Sam and Tray did though.

"We could ask Mum" Sam suggested. "She'd know."

"Was she there?" Tray asked, and he looked from Sam to me.

"Nope" I said. I didn't think Sookie would want to be reminded of it much.

Tray shrugged. "My friend Harry doesn't have a dad, maybe he got decapi…you know, his head got blown off by an airbag."

"Um…doesn't happen to everyone" I said, but Tray didn't seem to like that explanation.

"It might have. And I might tell his mum she should try getting another one. Harry says it's sucky without a dad."

"Yeah…I wouldn't…" I tried, but Tray lost interest in us as he saw Felicia walk around the side of the house and he kicked the ball at her, hard.

"Watch it fuckface" Felicia yelled, deflecting the ball, and coming straight at Tray to punish him.

Pam came down the steps. "Mum says it's dinnertime" she announced. "And you have to clean up and come inside."

"Yeah, other way round Pam" Sam said.

"Oh, whatever!" Pam yelled, in a striking imitation of Amelia.

"No, not _whatever_" Sam said. "We can't wash out here, so we have to go inside first."

"Oh!" Pam threw her hands up. That sounded like Sookie. "It's not important. But it's _dinner_. So you have to stop playing out here."

"I'm going to be there first!" Tray yelled, running past the rest of us and just about knocking Pam over on the steps.

"No you're not, you little turd" Felicia said, running after him, and trying to tackle him in the doorway to the house.

"Watch out for Ivan!" Sookie called out, as he started barking at the running kids. Clearly Eddie the cat was in the way as well as he sprinted down the steps and into the garden.

"You didn't get me!" Tray yelled from somewhere inside the house.

"I will!" Felicia half-screamed.

"Quietly!" Sookie shouted at them from the kitchen.

"You're a poo-head" Pam said to Sam as he passed her. Sam didn't say anything; he just gave her a look that suggested her opinion wasn't worth commenting on. "Daddy!" Pam wailed. "Sam looked at me!"

"Just go inside Pam" I said. "Or you'll miss out on dinner."

Pam looked horrified at that idea, and quickly turned and went inside. "Mum!" she called. "Mummy! Wait for me. I was telling them, and I'm not there yet. Don't give Tray my potatoes!"

And then it was just me in the garden. I guessed I'd fucking have to get used to that.

Fuck. I did not want to go.

SPOV

I couldn't do much for Eric. I couldn't go with him, or instead of him or any of the other things I'd like to do to show him I was there for him. So I was stuck with the small stuff. I'd re-organised his suitcase, and I'd made roast lamb for dinner.

That was going to have to do.

Eric seemed to appreciate it though. Well, that was what I took from the amount of food he loaded onto his plate. Maybe it was just that he was bulking up to get through the flight and the time sitting at a hospital. But I was glad I'd made extra Yorkshire puddings, anyway.

Tray was a bit less worried about his dad though, and a bit more worried about rationing. "Is there going to be enough for leftovers?" he asked. "If Dad eats all of that? You said we could have lamb sandwiches for lunch tomorrow." He looked at me worriedly.

"Dad won't be here tomorrow" I said, gently. "Remember? He flies out tonight." I hoped he'd show a bit of concern for Eric.

"Oh yeah. Oh, well that's alright then. There should be enough if it's just us" Tray said, and he started eating.

Poor Eric. The kids weren't really concerned that he wasn't going to be here, or that he was going off to deal with something unpleasant. Mostly they were concerned about their stomachs.

And in Amelia's case, they'd opted out of the evening altogether. She was off with Riley at the movies, although she kept insisting it wasn't a date. She had spent a long time getting ready for it though.

Eric had been a bit worried about the two of them going out, until I pointed out they were getting a police escort because while Riley might have turned 14 now and no longer qualified as Amelia's toy-boy, he couldn't exactly drive a car. I wasn't sure whether that set Eric's mind at rest so much as Amelia complaining that Andy had spent all week telling Riley that he might take the rest of the family to see a movie as well, maybe even the same one. "But he won't do that, will he Mum?" she kept asking me. I didn't know because Andy liked to torment Riley about his new-found interest in girls from what I could gather. Halleigh just said she was pleased if only for the fact that it had made Riley slightly more interested in things like clean shirts and underwear.

So Amelia was off being a good influence on Riley, or possibly just sharing her popcorn with Andy, Halleigh and Ruby, and had said a casual goodbye to Eric when she left in the afternoon. Without even a backward glance. It didn't seem right somehow. Surely as the eldest she would understand what a horrible thing he was going to do?

I guessed her own life was more important though. That really sucked for Eric.

After dinner we piled the kids in the car and drove to the airport. I half-expected Eric to be quieter than usual, but he wasn't. He was in full-force yelling at the kids to fuck up every time the noise from the back got too bad. It was weird, you'd think without Amelia it would be quieter, but it wasn't. Somehow it was louder and more lawless than ever. Maybe Amelia was a good influence on more than just Riley.

I wondered what the tipping point would be, and how many kids we'd have to lose somewhere before the car actually got quieter.

And then when we got to the airport, the endless questions started. "Can I get McDonalds?" Tray asked.

"No, you just had dinner" I reminded him.

"Can I go and look at the shops?" Pam asked.

"No, we're here to say goodbye to Daddy" I said to her, as Eric was off checking in.

"Can we go and see the planes land?" Sam said. "Um…afterwards…"

I sighed. "No, afterwards we're going home." I was exhausted. Worrying about Eric was turning into a full-time occupation and I didn't expect to sleep much tonight. I wished I could ask him if he was worried too, but it wouldn't be a good look in front of the kids.

"Hang on. I'm just texting Caitlin to say I'm not at home…" Felicia said, as we tried to move away from the check-in area and go up to the floor where the departure gates were.

"Come on" I said. "Daddy'll have to go through soon."

Felicia shrugged. That wasn't her problem obviously.

"Walk and text, Leesh" Eric said, as he strode off. At least he wasn't angry with them. I wasn't quite so forgiving. How had I managed to raise such selfish little snots?

We trudged up the stairs to the next level which was even more enticing for the kids. "McDonalds is just over there" Tray pointed out.

"Mmm" I agreed.

"Look!" Pam squealed. "There's sheep! Can I get a sheep?"

"They're for tourists, Pam" Felicia said. "You're weird, but you're not that weird."

"Who's weird?" Sam asked.

"Pam. And you. Probably Tray" Felicia explained.

"You're weird" Sam said, under his breath. Almost under his breath.

"You smell" Felicia retorted.

"That shop has t-shirts! Can we look at the t-shirts?" Pam tried.

"Is that the shop with the giant chocolate bars?" Tray asked. "I want some chocolate."

I wanted them all to bugger off and annoy someone else for a bit so I could talk to Eric. Not that I really knew what I was going to say…but I'm sure it would be good. And it would make us both feel better. I felt crappy, and I was sure he did too. After all, he was the one going off to face the death of a parent. My stomach clenched every time I thought about having to do it myself.

And then I imagined if it was me, and all the kids were sitting beside my bed bickering about who got to eat my hospital meal and whose turn it was change the water in the flowers. At least they wouldn't be there alone.

But Eric was going to be there all by himself, and I hated it. And I wished the kids hated it a bit more too. At least enough to not just wander randomly into souvenir shops. I really hoped that Tray didn't decide to throw that rugby ball he'd just picked up.

Eric looked up at the screen. "I guess I'd better go through" he said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "Or they might leave without you." Which would be OK, I thought, because I was pretty sure there would be enough leftover lamb for lunch tomorrow, even if we were feeding him as well.

"It'll be OK" Eric said, hugging me. "I think they'll behave for you." I felt him move one arm in a waving motion, and I figured he was warning one of the kids away from something. I was going to miss him, and it wasn't just as the person in charge of keeping the kids in line. I was going to miss him, and worry about him, and not feel quite whole until he was back here again.

"You take care of yourself" I said, and this time Eric didn't say anything about me treating him like one of the kids, he just kissed me, and it was a good kiss and even one of our children making groaning noises in the background didn't distract me. I hoped Eric knew that I was there with him, in spirit anyway. He could always call me.

"You can always call us" I said. "When you know…you miss us."

"I'll do that" Eric said, and then his eyes flicked to the kids. They lined up to say goodbye, but they were still mostly concerned with themselves. "So remember what we looked at. On-line. The stuff from the toy shop. That I liked" Pam said, nodding at Eric.

"Yep, I will Pam" he said, as he hugged her.

"Hey, can I get a new phone? Duty free?" Felicia asked, frowning at hers.

"I'll think about it, Leesh. Good luck at netball."

Felicia shrugged. "Yeah, they're a crap team. We'll be great. Well, I will be" Felicia said, as she gave Eric a hug.

"Can I get a phone?" Tray asked hopefully.

"Not before I get one" Sam said.

"Well…what about Leesh's old phone?" Tray asked.

"It's not an old phone yet, you moron. It's still _my_ phone. So keep your grubby paws off it."

Tray and Sam accepted hugs from Eric, still bickering over who would get Felicia's phone in the event they threw her under the nearest bus, and then, after one more hug to me, Eric was gone, and he walked through the gate to the security checks.

I felt awful, but I didn't have time to dwell on it. "So…it's a while since dinner, eh Mum?" Tray said hopefully.

EPOV

It was a shitty flight, but they're always shitty flights when I'm leaving them all behind. And this time was worse than most. Without the distraction of the kids constantly talking and fighting and asking questions I was left with my own shitty thoughts. And they were all shitty thoughts.

I didn't want to do this; I didn't want to be there, with him. The last minute flight had not been cheap and I'd fucking resented every cent I'd spent on it, but I resented my time even more. He'd never fucking had time for me and now I was expected to do this, for him? Fuck him.

And I wondered what it would be like when it was my turn. Would Sam and Tray have learnt from me that your father's death was fucking nothing? Fuck. Maybe I should have been talking to them about…I didn't know. Fucking being there for your family, more than we should have been talking about decapitation via airbag.

I didn't fucking know what was right. But none of this felt right.

I landed, and picked up a rental car and then started the drive. I felt gross after the flight. I'd spent too long sitting in a shitty plane eating shitty food and crushed up with people I didn't fucking like and I wanted nothing more than to go home. To go home and see Sookie and just have it all go away.

But it wouldn't go away. And I had to face it. So I drove to the hospital and went straight up to the floor they said dad was being treated on. I found a reception desk and asked for the doctor. Because maybe he'd say there was no point being there, and I could turn around and drive back to the airport. There was always that fucking hope.

It was a vain fucking hope though. The doctor came in. "He'll be glad you're here" he said to me. "He's, uh…well there haven't been any visitors. And he said his son was coming. From Australia, is it?"

"New Zealand" I corrected, automatically. Guess that woman of his had fucked off then. He was probably better off without her. She was a bitch. "So, uh…is there any change?" I asked.

The guy probably thought I was hoping for a miracle, because he got this weird look of concern on his face. "I'm very sorry, Mr Davis" he said. "But there's nothing we can do anymore. It's just…well; we're keeping him as comfortable as we can." He stopped for a moment, and seemed to choose his words carefully. "I think perhaps you'd better go in and see him now" he said quietly.

"OK" I said, his words sinking in. Somehow it had all seemed a bit unreal from the other side of the world. Somehow I had thought that I would arrive and they would say that it was all a mistake and he'd managed to dig himself out of a grave once again. I guessed his luck had finally run out.

And so had mine.

The doctor ushered me down the hall towards the room that held my dad. "You can stay as long as you want" he said, and then he turned to leave.

"Yeah…uh…" Something occurred to me. "It's not Davis" I said. "I, uh. My name's different. It's Northman."

"Oh" the doctor said. He didn't sound particularly interested in me. I supposed I wasn't the patient after all. And then he left.

It was the last thing I really wanted to think about at this fucking time. And as much as I'd wished Sookie was here, just so I wasn't doing this alone, I realised it was a good thing I probably was. Because if the secret identity of courgettes was number one on the list of things Sookie hadn't got around to telling me yet, that name thing, was that was probably the first item on my fucking list.

But it wasn't really important about now.

I pushed the door open and walked in.

**Thanks for reading!**


	25. Chapter 25

**A/N Yes, I've been a bit quieter recently, but it was very exciting here because the sun finally came out and we got some summer. So I've been outside, which was lovely. I did manage to get this written though, because sometimes you just have to ignore the fact the two year old is parading around outside naked apart from pink Barbie gumboots and get on with your life. I'm sure it gave the neighbours a laugh!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I had a restless night's sleep with no Eric in bed with me. It was surprising how much I hated having all that room to myself with no one sleeping right up against me, or actually on top of me, or pinning my hair to the pillow so I couldn't move my head, or snoring loudly right next to my ear, or assuming that it was OK to go to sleep squeezing my boob like it was a cuddly, or pushing all the covers off because he was hot. I'd had all of that for so many years now that I was mostly used to it. And above all else it was comforting having that presence in bed with me. It was comforting having Eric in bed with me.

It was horrible being in bed all alone.

So I wasn't hanging around in bed for sleep-in Sunday, that was for sure. I got out of bed and wrapped myself up in my dressing gown and walked into the kitchen. None of the kids seemed to be stirring yet and it was eerie having the house to myself. Well almost to myself, Ivan had woken up and was padding around after me.

"He's not here" I explained, and Ivan gave me a look that I'm pretty sure meant he thought I was responsible for Eric's mysterious disappearance. Like maybe I'd buried him in the back garden in the middle of the night.

"Well, you go outside and have a look then" I said, and we walked to the bi-fold doors to the deck. I pulled up the blind and saw that everything was foggy and miserable. I opened the door and Ivan didn't look enthused about the outside world, so I kind of pushed him with my foot, before shutting the door behind him.

Ivan didn't look pleased with that development. And neither did Bella, who'd been coming up the stairs to the deck. She hissed at Ivan and Ivan whined. I opened the door again and Bella deigned to come in, and I shut it again before Ivan got ideas. "Go wees!" I said through the door and I hoped he understood.

I went back to the kitchen and looked around. It was quiet and empty and I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. Bella had an idea of what I should be doing though, and she sat and looked at me pointedly until I made a move to pick up the animal's bowls and start filling them with food. Stan appeared and he and Bella had a set-to which I stupidly put myself in the middle of, only to end up with a lovely scratch down one arm. Eddie slunk in to be fed as well, Ivan whined at the door until I let him in, but as soon as they were all fed they were pretty much done with me and my company. I got some cereal and sat down at the table to eat it.

I was kind of lonely.

For a moment or two anyway.

"Are you up?" Sam asked, as he came into the kitchen.

"Yeah" I said. "Aren't your feet cold?" I didn't know how he could wander round with bare feet in the middle of winter.

"Nope" Sam said, looking around. "Are you making breakfast?" He looked at my bowl.

"I don't mind" I said. "Did you want to make your own?"

"Um…" Sam said thoughtfully as Tray bowled into the room, almost landing on top of him. "Watch it!" Sam said. Tray didn't reply. "There's no breakfast!" he said, looking at me.

"We were just discussing it. Sam was deciding if he wanted to make his own."

"Well…I don't" Tray informed me.

"I wasn't making anything fancy" I said to him, and his face fell. "I guess I could have Weetbix…" he said, looking at the pantry as though it might suddenly spew forth something better and more edible.

"Or we could do baked bean toasties?" Sam suggested, looking at me.

"Um…well. I guess" I said. "We can call it brunch." It was just bread and baked beans, after all.

"I'll get the sandwich maker out" Sam announced, as he pulled open the cupboard it lived in. Except it was the cupboard it used to live in.

"I moved it" I said. I'd finally managed to reorganise the kitchen. I'd been so worried on Friday it had seemed like the perfect time for a good sort-out and cleaning the bottoms of all my cupboards had taken my mind off things. For a while, anyway. But even then, I'd still been mulling over what might happen to Eric while he was away. And for some reason, I'd thought it a good idea to move the toasted sandwich maker. To one of the high cupboards. I'd asked Eric to do it for me when he arrived home, mainly, I think, just to keep him in the kitchen with me for a bit longer before he had to go back to his phone calls.

"It's up there" I said to Sam, pointing to which one it was in.

"Oh" Sam said, looking up. We both contemplated it for a moment and then I went into the laundry to get the step-stool. I was clearly going to have to find a new home for it I thought.

Or not. When I came back into the kitchen Sam was balanced on the kitchen bench, handing the sandwich maker to Tray who was hovering around him, looking pretty much like Ivan did when he was anxious about whether he'd get fed or not. Sam closed the cupboard and crouched in preparation for jumping down, and then he noticed me. "What?" he said, as he jumped onto the kitchen floor.

"Um…just. It's like living with chimpanzees…or something…" I said. I'd half expected him to grab hold of the light fixture and swing himself across the kitchen.

Sam shrugged. "Dad's away" he said. He was right in that Eric's absence did cut off our access to a lot of the stuff in the kitchen, but I worried that if he was that easily replaced after just a day, how well we'd be coping after a week. Or two weeks. Or three.

That was a depressing thought. And I couldn't figure out whether the fact that the kids were developing new skills to compensate was a good or a bad thing either.

It was all just a bit…not quite right.

Sam got out bread and he and Tray had a small sword fight with some of the cutlery before they got down to the business of actually making the sandwiches. Well, of smearing butter and dripping baked beans all over the bench-top anyway.

Eddie turned up and sat beside his bowl, looking at me. And then after a while looking at his bowl in confusion when it hadn't been filled. "You've already had breakfast, Eddie" I reminded him, but his little feline brain couldn't comprehend that one. In the end he ate some baked beans that had been spilled on the floor, and wandered off giving me a rather dirty look over his shoulder.

He'd no doubt be back in about five minutes to do the same thing again.

In the meantime, though, Felicia arrived. "Are you doing toasties for breakfast?" she asked Sam, before she'd said hello to anyone.

"Well, duh" Sam replied, carefully removing the latest batch from the sandwich maker. Tray was now sitting at the table with me, eating his sandwich, dripping baked beans all down his chin. Felicia gave him a disgusted look.

"Move over, doofus" she said to Sam. "I want to make one."

"Try saying please" I reminded her.

"_Please_ move doofus" she said, and Sam took his sandwich and put it on the table. He looked at me. "Do you want a cup of tea, Mum?" he asked.

"Um…" I said, considering it. I looked at the coffee maker. No hope in hell of me getting that to work.

"Oh, go on, go on, go on, go on" Felicia said, as she took the cheese out of the fridge. She was getting further through the box of Bill's old DVDs and was now past _Red Dwarf_ and on to _Father Ted_. It was an uncannily good impression of Mrs Doyle, I had to say. If she made it as far as _The I.T. Crowd _and started telling me to 'try turning it off and on' I was going to be annoyed though. I'd had enough of that to last a lifetime the first time around.

Sam took that as a yes and filled the electric jug and got it boiling before he sat down at the table with his sandwich, which was probably a smart move because Tray had finished and was eyeing it up.

Pam walked in, rubbing her eyes. "I didn't know it was up time!" she wailed. "No one said!"

"We don't have to say. You just get up" Felicia pointed out, as Sam gobbled the last bites of sandwich and jumped up to make my tea.

"But I did!" Pam said. "I got up and no one was up, so I went back to bed to read my books. And then I missed up time!"

I looked at her more closely and I could see the line down the side of her face where she'd clearly fallen asleep again on a book. "What time was that Pam?"

Pam shrugged. She was getting better at reading but time was still a bit mysterious. "There was a four…" she said, wrinkling her nose.

"At the beginning or the end?" I asked as her interpretation of even a digital alarm clock was fluid.

"Dunno" she said, looking around at what her siblings were eating. "I don't want toasties!" she announced. "I want French toast."

"Dad isn't here" Felicia said, and Pam's face fell.

"I could do it" I offered, but the look Pam gave me would have made lesser women burst into tears. Yeah, I couldn't apparently. There were some things you just couldn't replace.

Well, that wasn't exactly news to me.

Pam sighed. "I'll just have toast and jam then. Plum jam."

"Uh, there's no plum left…" I said, and Pam whirled around.

"Where'd it all go?" she asked, accusingly. As person in charge of shopping I somehow got blamed for all the stuff that got eaten, even when I wasn't the one who finished it up.

"I think you ate it…" I said, somewhat tentatively. It was probably a bit ridiculous to be wary of the five year old's reaction to being accused of eating the last of the jam. But I was. Pam could be unpredictable in her moods.

"Well…no" Pam said. "There was some yesterday morning, because I had it yesterday morning, and I haven't had any since, so it can't have been me. Someone else ate the jam. Someone stole my jam!" She looked around the room, accusingly.

"It's not just your jam" Sam pointed out and Pam's gaze fixed on him. "Did you eat it?" she asked, and I half-expected her to pull a large torch out and shine it in his eyes. Sam put a cup of tea down in front of me and ignored Pam.

"I think it was Tray" Pam announced. "He eats everything!"

"What?" Tray asked, looking up from where he was hovering around Felicia eating scraps of cheese. "I don't like plum jam."

"Well, someone ate it!" Pam said. "Someone ate all my jam and now I don't have any jam!" I hadn't quite realised that plum jam was the key to happiness for Pam, but clearly, it was.

"You ate it" Tray said. "You like it."

"I DID NOT!" Pam yelled. "I didn't! I wouldn't do that, because it isn't nice!" It was no good trying to pin stuff on Pam; she'd fight you to the death to deny it. We'd learnt that when she was a toddler and prone to pilfering stuff from her siblings. It didn't matter if the little pink stool she stood on to reach things was left behind as evidence of exactly what had happened, she'd still deny point blank that she was the person responsible for the mysterious disappearance.

"Um…" I said, trying to think how to diffuse the situation. This was when Eric was useful. Well, sometimes he was useful. There was always the chance that Pam would have accused him of eating the jam and then it would have really kicked off. Eric didn't take to being accused of things any better than Pam herself did, and the combination could be explosive.

"What about the jar?" Felicia asked casually, and Pam whirled on her. I tried not to think 'phew', but I failed. Call me a bad mother, but I was feeling kind of relieved they might fight amongst themselves and leave me out of it.

Shit, when had I turned into Eric?

"What jar?" Pam demanded. "The jar from the plum jam that SOMEONE ELSE ATE?" She looked around accusingly.

Felicia shrugged. "That jar you had yesterday, you were going to decorate it…with crayon?"

"Melted crayon" Pam confirmed. "You put them in a candle. Mum has to be there." She paused and thought for a moment. It was quite a long moment, and she kind of stared off into space, ignoring the way Felicia was now grinning at her.

"So, what do you think Daddy is doing now?" Pam asked me. "Is he having breakfast too? Is he having peanut butter toast? I'm going to have peanut butter toast because Daddy likes peanut butter." Hopeful that she'd distracted me enough, she walked back to the pantry to get the peanut butter.

Well I might have been turning into Eric, but Pam seemed to be able to channel him without even trying.

"It's not breakfast time there" Sam said. "It's lunch time." Pam ignored him though; too busy making her own breakfast.

I turned to watch Felicia wiping down the bench top with the sleeve of her favourite grey cardigan. I was going to have to prise that off her at some stage to wash it. It was looking pretty well-worn now, and was pilling and fraying, but there was no way she was giving it up any time soon.

And then when she turned around to sit down at the table with her own toasted sandwich I finally registered what it was she was wearing underneath the cardigan. "Um…where did that come from?" I asked her.

"I made it" she said, biting her sandwich. "I'm not making one for anyone else." She turned around and glared at Tray.

"I might make some more" Sam announced and Tray gave him the same look Eddie had been giving me earlier.

"No, the t-shirt" I said, pointing to it. "How'd you get hold of that?"

Felicia shrugged. "Found it" she said. Well that was pretty good going on her part because I thought I'd hidden it quite well in the laundry after the last time it went through the wash, with a view to slowly moving it in the direction of the bin. "I don't think Dad wants it" she continued. "He'd left it in the laundry with the dog-towels."

"Yeah…" I said. "Isn't it a bit big on you though?"

Felicia looked unconcerned. "It's for sleeping in; it's supposed to be big." I wasn't sure how comfy it was sleeping in something that was actually big enough to be a tent.

"It's kind of old…" I pointed out.

"Meh" Felicia said. "It's got a cool print. And it's from a concert."

"Mmm" I said, stopping myself adding 'from before you were born'. Felicia took a large bite of her sandwich and Amelia burst into the room.

"You're all so loud!" she shouted. "Why are you so loud? You woke me up!"

"It's up-time" Pam said, from her spot by the toaster. Now the mystery of the missing jam had been solved she was back to being the cheerful morning person she usually was. Amelia wasn't though, she wasn't much of a morning person these days and it was hard to remember back to the times when she'd been the one to wake us all up and demand we start the day.

"For you. Not for me" Amelia said, as she shuffled in. At least she wasn't wearing anyone else's clothes, although I had noticed the previous day that despite all the time she'd spent ransacking her own wardrobe in preparation for her date which wasn't really a date, she'd eventually left the house wearing my blue knit top with the scoop in the front and the back and my velvet blazer. It was nice that she approved of my choices in clothing; it just might have been nicer if she'd asked first.

"There's no coffee!" Amelia said, sounding horrified.

"There's no Dad" Felicia pointed out. "Mum's having tea."

"I don't like tea" Amelia said, wrinkling her nose up.

"It probably doesn't like you either" Felicia said to her, before standing up and taking her plate over the dishwasher.

Amelia opened her mouth to say something, but didn't get a chance as Tray came over to talk to her. With his mouth full. "So the movie was good?" he said, and Amelia wrinkled her nose at the sight of the half-chewed baked beans.

"It was OK" she said. "Lots of things blew up." I got the feeling she'd gone with Riley's choice.

"Awesome!" Tray said, enthusiastically. "Dad said he'll take us."

"But he's not here" Amelia pointed out. "So you can't go now."

"Yeah" Tray said, sounding a little sad. "What are we doing today, Mum?"

I looked outside at the still foggy morning and wished it was summer. Summer was easier. We could go to the beach at Pt. Chev and Amelia and I could sit and read in the shade, Felicia could swim, Pam could collect seashells and the boys could climb the rocks and swing off the branches of the pohutakawa trees. Much easier than a grotty day at home.

But it wasn't summer. And it was just me here to entertain them.

"I don't know" I said. "And right now, I'm going for a shower." I stood up and put my own bowl in the dishwasher before leaving the kitchen. I'd deal with the clean-up later, once they'd stopped going back for seconds, and thirds. And arguing amongst themselves.

I felt kind of numb. And I still missed Eric.

I showered and dressed and tried to tell myself that it made me feel better, but I wasn't really buying it. I walked back to the kitchen to start the inevitable process of mopping up smears of baked beans off everything when I heard Felicia say "You're an ass!" to someone.

"It's _arse_, you complete dimwit" Amelia yelled back. "Stop trying to be American. You're not American!"

And then the most bizarre thing happened. I heard Eric say "Amelia, you've been listening to your mother again. It's clearly ass." Except that part-way through, I realised it wasn't Eric, it was Sam. But it was a bloody good imitation.

I walked into the kitchen as everyone was standing around giggling, even Amelia. Sam saw me though, and stopped laughing and stared at the floor.

I felt like an intruder in my own kitchen. "Um…" I said. "That was, um, well…you sound like Dad." Sam half-looked at me, and then looked at the floor again.

"He does. It's funny" Tray assured me.

"I don't know how you do the accent" Felicia said. "I can't do the accent." She looked a bit put-out at that.

Sam shrugged. "I just can" he said. "The vowels are weird though." There were nods all round over that one. Well, apart from Pam who, despite the fact she'd been laughing at Sam, still obviously felt some residual loyalty to Eric. "They're _not_ weird!" she insisted. "They're…um…American…"

"Same diff" Felicia said. "I mean, no one else around here speaks like that."

"Ella's mum does" Pam said.

"Bella?" I asked.

"Ella!" Pam repeated. "You know. Ella. From preschool."

"Oh" I said, realisation dawning. "She's Canadian."

"Same diff" Felicia said again, shrugging.

"I don't think it is…" Pam said. "Is it?" she wrinkled her nose.

"No" Sam said, switching accents again. "It is not, Pam. It would be like calling your mother an Australian, and you've seen how well that goes." The kids exploded with laughter again, even Pam, although she was a bit reticent about it.

And then something occurred to me. "Um…do any of you do me?" I asked, and there was almost immediate silence. A few eyes shifted to Amelia though. Hmm, maybe it wasn't just a case of borrowing my clothes then. But I didn't have a chance to press them further because Pam was still stuck on the American accent thing.

"I can't tell the difference" she announced, "because _I've_ never been. No one took me! And I love planes! I was really good when we went to Fiji!"

"You snored on the way home" Sam reminded her. "Loudly."

"Shut up!" Pam said to him. "Just because you've been to Disneyland. I've never been to Disneyland. I never get to do anything!" She sighed dramatically.

"You always fall asleep whenever we do anything" Felicia pointed out.

"No I don't!" Pam said.

"Well…it's OK" Amelia said, consolingly. "You're just little, so, you know…you have to sleep a lot?"

Pam didn't take that well. "I'm not a baby!" she hissed.

Amelia shrugged. "You're only five" she said. I was tempted to point out how she'd been adamant she was a big girl when she was five, but it wouldn't do any good. And it wouldn't get Pam to get off the 'I've never been to the States' rant she was currently on.

"It's not that great in the States, anyway" Amelia said. "It's like here, but you know, everyone sounds like Dad…so that's, like, kinda weird. But not." She shrugged.

"I still want to go" Pam said, crossing her arms. She turned to look at me, and the other four followed her gaze.

"Well…maybe" I said, before I realised what I was actually saying. "Maybe we'll go back."

"I want to go now" Pam said. "I miss Daddy!" Yeah, I did too.

"It's booring without Dad" Sam said, looking outside at the still foggy morning.

"There's no coffee" Amelia grumbled, looking at the coffee machine which sat silently gleaming on the bench.

"We can't do _anything_ fun" Tray said, and then he looked at me. "Not in the house anyway." Yeah, Eric was better than the Cat in the Hat on a yucky day.

"I hate winter" Felicia complained. "I hate winter and I hate it when Dad's not here. Even if I did get his shirt…it's a cool shirt." She looked down and smiled to herself. I guess she really did like that horrible old thing.

"It's all just sucky" Tray said, and there were nods all round.

They were right. It was kind of sucky without Eric.

But I think I had a plan.

EPOV

I walked into Dad's hospital room and looked at him, attached to all the machines. His skin was grey and sunken and if it wasn't for the fact that one of those machines was beeping on a regular basis, I might have thought he was already fucking dead.

I stopped and just stood there, unsure what to do. All of a sudden I was so fucking tired. I felt like shit, and I didn't want to be here. It was fucking awful, all so fucking awful.

I had just about decided to back out of the room, when Dad suddenly opened his eyes. He stared at me for a minute or two and I had the awful thought that maybe he didn't fucking know me and if he asked who I was, what would I say? Would I take that as an excuse to apologise and turn around and walk away?

But he coughed and then he said "You're here", and there was no fucking going back now.

"Yep" I confirmed. "I'm here."

"Guess you had to see if it's really true, huh?" he said. "If I'm really on my fucking way out." He gave me a disgusted look.

I shrugged. "I came" I said, I wasn't sure how else to explain it. I couldn't even tell you why I was fucking there. I guess it was what you did, didn't you? Even when you fucking didn't want to.

I sat down.

"Make yourself at home, I guess" Dad said. "I'd offer you a drink, but all you get in here is water."

A nurse came into the room, and gave me a small smile before she came over to check some of the machines. "Yeah, what do I have to do to get a fucking drink around here?" Dad asked her.

"You want some water Mr Davis?" she said casually.

"No. And you can fuck off and stop bothering me" he said, harshly. "You can all fuck right off and stop fucking hanging around like the fucking ghouls you are."

The nurse looked at him and pursed her lips, but she didn't say anything to him. She just walked towards the door. "I'll see you later on" she said to Dad.

"Fucking bitch" Dad muttered. "They're all fucking bitches." He didn't say anything for a few moments, but then he turned his head to look at me. The movement looked painful.

"So…you got away then?" he asked. "From her."

"Sookie."

"Yeah…I thought she had you on a pretty short leash these days. All those fucking kids. Surprised you could make it. Suppose I should feel pretty lucky about that. But I'm fucking dying. So forgive me for not prostrating myself at your feet."

I wanted to tell him to fuck off, to just shut the fuck up because he knew nothing about my life. And he didn't deserve to talk about Sookie and my kids. That was my fucking life and it had absolutely nothing to do with him.

But I didn't. I just sat there and stared at the wall. Dad looked like he was waiting for me to say something, but he didn't say anything else.

We sat like that for a while. And then another nurse came in. "Hi Stan!" she said brightly, "You doing alright? Oh, you got a visitor!"

"Yep" Dad said. "My son."

"Oh, isn't that nice!" the nurse said, patting Dad on the arm as she moved around the bed. "So I guess we'll be doing that sponge bath later on, then?" she said, giving Dad a wink. Fuck, really?

Dad laughed, and sat up a bit straighter in the bed. "You know I'll be holding you to that right?" he said.

"It's a date" the nurse said, leaning right over Dad. Surely she knew he was dying? And she wouldn't be getting an invitation to move in from him? Maybe she was angling for something from his will? Fuck, I didn't know. I didn't know what any of them fucking saw in him. Couldn't they tell he was a waste of fucking space?

"I'll leave you with your son, then" the nurse said, smoothing down Dad's bedcovers and then checking the level on one of the bottles attached to him. "And I'll be seeing you later on."

"You bring the wine" Dad called out to her as she left the room. I don't think he saw the look she gave me. Yeah, fuck. It was all just an act. That look, that was pure pity. And if she was feeling sorry for me, then fuck knows what she felt for Dad, but I didn't think it involved looking forward to spending quality time with him during a sponge bath.

She was just trying to make him feel better. And he couldn't fucking see it.

"That Bernice" he said, "She's one of the good ones. She fucking knows how to look after her patients. Fuck, some of them are hard fucking bitches. And I'd know about hard fucking bitches." He stopped talking, and he looked at me. "So she called you. She asked for your number. Asked the doctor for your number, and he asked me."

"Uh-huh" I said, wondering if this was going to turn into one of Dad's long fucking stories about how the latest woman had fucking up and left him for no good reason other than she was a bitch and didn't deserve him. I'd heard it all before.

"She wouldn't fucking stay" he said.

"Yeah" I said. I could understand why. It was fucking depressing being here. I guess once she figured her meal ticket was about to fucking die on her, she packed her shit and found someone else.

"She wouldn't fucking stay the first time either" he said. "She just…she never fucking wanted me." He stared straight ahead and not at me.

"It was…" I couldn't even believe what I was saying. "It was…_her_?"

"Yeah. Biggest fucking bitch I ever crossed paths with. Fucking ruined my life, and didn't want to stick around for my death." He paused. "I just…I just wanted her to _stay_…" and then he did the worst fucking thing he'd ever done to me in my life. He started crying.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't really believe she'd called and then she'd just left. Left him. Left me. Again. Fuck. I didn't know what to feel.

But I couldn't be around Dad any longer. This was his pain, it wasn't mine. I'd moved on, I didn't fucking need her anymore and I'd be fucking damned before I'd shed another tear over her.

I'd needed him to do this thirty years ago, not now. It was too late now.

So I patted him on the hand, and I left.

**Thanks for reading!**


	26. Chapter 26

**A/N So, I live with a serial killer. He's very cute, a little on the pudgy side maybe, and sometimes it's annoying when he bites me when he's hungry. He's fond of trying to share my pillow in the middle of the night, but I let him off because he purrs. We found his kills the other day when hubby followed the smell and found the skink (lizard) graveyard under the outdoor table. There were about five little corpses in various states hidden there. But yet I can't persuade him to get the bird that carried off my cherry tomatoes, can I? What good's a pet serial killer if he won't get your enemies for you, that's what I want to know?**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. I own a very effective but not very biddable killing machine. And a cherry tomato plant with no tomatoes.**

EPOV

I drove back to Dad's house and let myself in. Luckily the location of the spare key hadn't moved and if anyone had decided to rob the place while Dad was in hospital, they'd been good enough to return the key before they left with the TV and the coffeemaker.

But when I opened up the door, everything was still there. It was all exactly the same as it had ever been, and just as fucking depressing. I stood in the hallway and briefly thought about just finding a motel. But a motel by myself would be just as fucking bad. This wasn't home, but I wasn't going to find anything resembling home anywhere around here.

My home was on the side of the fucking Pacific Ocean.

I dragged my suitcase inside and thought about what to do next. I really wanted a shower. And sleep. Maybe food. Would there be food?

There wasn't any fucking food. There was enough fucking booze around, I could have fucking started my own bar, but nothing to fucking eat. I called for pizza instead, and then I figured I could have that shower. I dragged my suitcase through the living room and further into the house, pausing beside Dad's bedroom. I thought about moving in there, but I just couldn't. He might be in the hospital, but I wasn't ready to just...fucking move in and replace him, even if he might not be coming out anytime soon. Or ever.

He might not be ever coming out. He wouldn't ever come out. That was a weird fucking thought. And even though I'd seen him, lying there, looking like he wasn't all that alive, I still didn't feel like it was true.

Of course he'd get out of hospital because then I'd be stuck with him because that was just the way it worked. I tried to live my life and Dad fucked it all up for me.

So it was back to my old room then, and I continued on down the hall to get to it. I pushed the door open and it was…depressing, like everything else in here. Dark and faded and I felt like I'd never left home, like this was going to be like all of the other fucking nights I'd spent sitting around, ordering pizza and waiting to see if Dad showed up, and who he showed up with.

I hated fucking feeling like that.

I left the suitcase and went to the bathroom to shower. It had always been a shitty fucking shower, and it wasn't any better now. And the bathroom was like the rest of the house, tired and fucking old. There were tiles missing, and a rust stain behind the shower head, and the ceiling was black with mould. Home maintenance had never been high on Dad's fucking list of priorities, possibly because it required a certain degree of sobriety.

And then I had a really depressing thought. If Dad didn't come back, if he was never coming back to this house, was it all going to be my fucking problem? I already had a fucking house, I didn't need this one. And I especially didn't need to remodel it just so I could sell it.

Fuck, this was almost too fucking much. Dad's alcohol collection was starting to seem more fucking appealing. After all, that was how he'd coped. If you were drunk enough then the rust stains and the missing tiles and the fact that the shower was still dripping even after I'd shut the fucking water off, all of that didn't matter so much did it? All that mattered was the next drink, and the next.

I dried off with a towel and went back to my room to find clean clothes. I opened up my suitcase and it looked wrong, somehow. And then I realised that Sookie had repacked it at some point…so, I had no idea where anything was. Or where my underwear was now situated. Or what the fuck that blue thing on top was.

But I didn't have too long to think about it because there was a knock at the door, which probably meant that the doorbell wasn't fucking working again and the guy with the pizza might have been standing there for a while.

I pulled stuff randomly out of the suitcase until I found some shorts, and then I scrambled into them, grabbed my wallet and ran to the door. When I opened it the kid who was standing there looked fucking pissed.

Well, he wasn't the only one having a shitty day.

"Where's the other dude?" he asked.

"Hospital" I said, trying to find where I'd actually put the fucking notes I needed in my wallet. I did have U.S. cash, didn't I? Fuck, I didn't think he'd take any New Zealand dollars. I scanned my wallet again and the kid sighed, noisily. I found what I needed and handed it over, and the kid gave me my pizza but just kept looking at the cash I'd given him.

"Alright?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "Yeah…" he said, slowly. "So…the other guy's back soon?" Yeah, fuck. Dad was nothing if not a fucking good tipper. I guess he had to make up for all his other faults somehow, and fuck knows, you could get away with a lot of shit by just tipping people.

"Nope" I said, and then I shut the door. Fuck it. I wasn't fucking Dad.

I ate my rather greasy and disgusting pizza and flipped channels, trying to ignore the increasing sense of déjà vu I was experiencing. I looked at Dad's chair and thought how innocuous it looked without him sitting in it, ruling the fucking living room. I wondered what my family was doing with their Sunday. I tried to picture it, but I couldn't think of anything that would have been appropriate for the middle of winter. Mostly I was stuck with the image of them all at the beach, that was always a good way to spend a Sunday. The kids could all amuse themselves, and hopefully not flick too much sand onto the neighbouring families, and I could sit with Sookie. And there'd be a picnic, sometimes just sandwiches which usually ended up gritty with sand, but sometimes she'd make that pasta salad with the corn in it, or a bacon and egg pie, and we'd sit on the picnic rug and watch the kids and just relax. Just hang out.

But they weren't at the beach, although they were probably all together at least. I felt empty without them. And even though I knew I'd had to come here, that I didn't have a fucking choice, a part of me felt like I'd been sent away, like this was a punishment. And it felt like a fucking punishment.

I switched off the TV and pulled out some sheets that I fucking hoped were clean and made up the bed in my old room. And then I looked in my suitcase again, hoping to find some underwear to sleep in. It was all just a fucking jumble of stuff now, but I pulled through everything and eventually found what I was looking for. And then I thought I'd take a closer look at that blue thing, which seemed familiar but wasn't anything I could remember packing.

I pulled it out and looked at it. It was a pillowcase. One of the pillowcases from home. I was fucking stumped as to why Sookie had packed it, had she packed sheets as well?

And then I saw there was a note pinned to it. Probably instructions on how to make a bed, although fuck knows, it wasn't like I was making Pam's bed. There wasn't a system. And I could put sheets on a mattress; I just had, for fuck's sake.

I looked at the note. It said _Dream of me_ in Sookie's handwriting. Oh. I looked at the pillowcase again. And then I smelt it. And then I felt so incredibly homesick I thought I might actually throw up. It was Sookie's pillowcase. And it smelt of Sookie.

I put it on the pillow. And then I got into bed and lay there and wished that Sookie was there with me and that it wasn't just a pillow I was holding, but Sookie herself.

When I woke up the next morning though, she wasn't there. And that sucked. It was still just me. Me, stuck here in a place I didn't want to be with my own shitty thoughts.

And no food I realised when I went into the kitchen. No food and no fucking coffee.

I dressed and then I got into the rental car and I drove to a diner. I didn't really want to be around other people, I really wasn't in the fucking mood for it, but I didn't have a lot of choice. The plan was go in, eat, and get out.

It would have been a perfect plan, if the waitress hadn't decided to fucking talk to me. "So, just you?" she said, as she poured my coffee.

"Uh-huh" I agreed, trying to read something on my phone and hoping she'd just fuck off. I'd call the kids in a few hours; try to catch them before they went to school. It was still hard to believe that Pam was actually at school. She seemed too young.

The waitress left and came back to take my order and that was when I looked at her. She wasn't anything special, kind of blonde, kind of pretty, kind of middle-aged. But she looked familiar. Fuck. Had she lived with us? I couldn't remember. I looked at her nametag, it read 'Mel'. I couldn't think of a Mel Dad had known, and now she was looking at me like she was trying to place me too.

Fuck, I should have just eaten cold pizza for breakfast.

"Um…Eric?" she asked, "Eric Davis?"

I wanted to tell her that wasn't my name, but fuck; it would just lead to more questions. And I didn't want to answer her questions at that moment. She'd want to know about Dad and I didn't want her sympathy, didn't want to see the look in her eyes when she realised she'd done the right thing in getting away from him when she did, glad that she hadn't had to be there when he finally drank himself to death. Happy that it was me instead.

"Yeah" I confirmed, and she broke into a huge smile.

"Oh, hey!" she said. "I haven't seen you in, like, forever! Wow, not since high school? I think. Maybe after that." I was still fucking lost. "It's Melanie" she said, "Melanie Bowen. Well, I used to be. I got married, now it's Melanie Hernandez. I married Carlos? Remember him? Yeah, well, that's my second marriage. First didn't work out so well. But wow, it's so great to see you! So how are you?"

Oh fuck. That was Melanie Bowen? When did Melanie Bowen get old? Was I that old? I didn't really know what to say. "I moved" I said. "Away."

"Well, duh" she said, rolling her eyes. "I figured that. I ran into your dad a while back and he said you were living in Australia…"

"New Zealand" I corrected, but she pretty much ignored me.

"Uh-huh. Wow that's a long way. I haven't gone anywhere! Well, I moved to Reno for a while, but that didn't work out so well. That was with my ex, and he was like 'oh it'll be so much better there', but it wasn't. It was just like here, and I tell you, if you've waited on one table, you've waited on them all, know what I mean? Well, of course you don't! I'm the one standing here with the pen and paper, aren't I?" She stopped talking and beamed at me. I didn't know what to say. Had she always talked this fucking much?

"Yeah…" I said slowly, hoping she'd take that pen and paper and hand my order in, but she didn't, she sat down opposite me.

"I'm just so thrilled to see you!" she said, laying a hand on my arm. "I'm sure the manager won't mind me sitting here, just for a moment. Well, she's pretty mean sometimes, but I'll just tell her we're catching up. Old friends and all of that. Hey, how long are back for?"

"Um…I don't really know…" I said. I didn't. It all depended on Dad. On Dad dying. Maybe he had been right, and it was ghoulish to come here and wait for it to happen. When I didn't really care about him anyway. I just…it was the right thing to do. So I was doing it. But I wasn't fucking enjoying it.

I might have liked some food though. But I wasn't getting any in a fucking hurry. Not if Melanie just kept sitting there talking at me.

"So you back to see your Dad?" she asked, and I nodded. She didn't press for more details. "I bet you've got some big fancy job though, right?" she asked. "In Australia?"

"New Zealand. I work for myself. Consulting." That covered everything, didn't it?

"I have _no_ idea what that is!" Melanie said, laughing. "So it sounds fancy to me! You know, I always thought you'd do well…I mean, after all, you went to college and everything. And me, I just stayed here. Had babies. That bit I didn't mind, but I tell you I never expected to be waiting tables at my age. But what are you going to do? Economy's not that great and we can't afford the payments on the house on just Carlos' wages, so I'm doing this. Just part-time. To tell you the truth though, sometimes it's better than home. Sometimes I'd rather be here than have to get them all ready. This is almost like a Sunday morning off for me! So what about you? You got kids?"

"Yeah" I said. "We have, um, five kids…" Melanie's eyes went wide with surprise. "Five! Oh, my Lord. How do you manage five? I can't deal with three most of the time. Your poor wife!" And then she paused, and checked herself. "So…you're married? And, you know, um, the kids are all with you?"

"Yeah" I said, wondering why she thought that wouldn't be the case. She looked visibly relieved. "Well I did wonder!" she said. "I thought maybe you were like one of those guys, you know, with all the baby mamas all over the place. Because, well, you know…because of what you were like."

Oh. Fuck.

"I mean we all wanted to be your girlfriend" Melanie said. "But you didn't really, um, do girlfriends did you? I mean, did you even go to prom?"

I shook my head for no.

"Yeah, I didn't think you had. I went with Carlos, and I shoulda stuck with him, but…well. Anyway, that's all water under the bridge now, and I'm not bitter, because you live and learn, don't you? And it's all a part of growing up. At least that's what I tell my daughter, she's sixteen now." She stopped and she looked around and I could see the woman who must be the manager looking hard at Melanie, probably silently warning her to get back to work, because there were hungry customers who needed to be fed, after all.

And I was one of them.

But Melanie turned back to me, and she gave me a look I couldn't really decipher. "Mostly" she said, "I tell her to keep away from the guys who are too pretty for their own good. The ones who make you feel special, and then let you know pretty damn quickly that you're not. They'll only break your heart." And then she stood up and walked over to the serving space and I could hear her talking to the people in the kitchen and laughing with them and I really fucking hoped she was giving them my order.

I felt even more like shit than I did before. But I was still hungry.

The food, when it came, was edible. Just. The coffee helped though, and when I left I made sure that I left a tip which was probably beyond what I needed to. And it wouldn't make up for anything, and it was just the kind of shitty thing Dad would do. But I did it anyway.

I didn't know what the fuck else I could do. I tried to head out the door as quickly as I could, but Melanie caught up to me. "Hey, Eric" she said. "Just, uh…I'm um, I'm sorry about your dad. I heard from Mom…she volunteers down at the hospital sometimes. So…yeah. I am. Sorry." And she gave me that pitying look I'd seen a thousand times before from all sorts of fucking people who lived around here. They were all sorry. And they'd been sorry before he'd even started dying. They were always fucking sorry. And they always fucking knew.

"Yeah. Thanks Melanie" I said, and then I walked out the door and drove to the hospital.

"You're back again" Dad said, as I walked into the room. "Two fucking days in a row. I must be fucking dying to deserve this. I can't remember the last time we spent two consecutive days together."

I sat down and listened to the monitor as it beeped next to me.

"So, you're here for long haul, huh?" Dad asked. "Here to see them put me in the ground and then you can gather it all up and head back to wherever the fuck it is you ran away to."

I didn't know what to say to that. I didn't want any of his shit. Well, most of his shit. And it wasn't why I was here.

"You know, for someone who has such a fucking perfect life, Eric, you sure don't like to share it, do you?" I shrugged, and Dad just kept looking at me. "Aren't you going to tell me about my grandchildren?"

"What do you want to know?" I asked, curious about where this was going.

"More to the point, what do you want to fucking tell me, you mean? Shit, Eric. You've spent all this time keeping them away from me. Do you not think I'd like to know _something_ about them?"

"Why now?" I asked. "Why'd you want to know now?"

"Why not, Eric? Why fucking not? I've got fuck all else to do but lie here and wait for the devil to come and get me." He laughed, but there wasn't a lot of mirth in it.

I wanted to tell him, I wanted to tell him how fantastic they were and how much I loved them and how they surprised me all the fucking time.

But he didn't really deserve it.

"They're all great" I said. "They're fine."

Dad looked at me for a moment. "Well, I guess they're not exactly preparing to go into mourning now, are they?"

"Why would they be?" I asked. "They don't know you."

"Yeah...that's right, Eric" Dad said, like I'd fucking hit on the answer to everything. "They don't know me and that's your fault. When they come and ask why they didn't know me, you'll be the one who'll have to say that it's because you wouldn't let them know me, because you were ashamed of where you came from, because you thought you were too fucking good for me and everyone else in this town. Fucking Eric _Northman_ who thinks he rules the fucking world and knows what's best for everyone in it. Well, your kids will prove you wrong on that point; I can tell you that now. Karma's a fucking bitch."

I took a deep breath and concentrated on the beeping of that fucking machine. If I could just concentrate on that, then I wouldn't yell, I wouldn't tell him exactly why his grandchildren didn't care about him, wouldn't tell him why I didn't care about him, and I didn't give a shit about what he thought.

Except that I did. Maybe. I just…

I didn't know what I wanted anymore. I'd given up on him so many times before, and I still kept coming back. Kept coming back to be told the same old shit; I'd ruined his life, I thought I was better than I was, it would all come back and get me in the end, I'd have been nothing without him. It was the same every fucking time.

"Yep" I said, nodding. "It is. Because look where it's fucking got you. Stuck there dying with no one to mourn you when you're gone." I walked out of the room before Dad could say anything and I continued down the corridor and stopped at a vending machine where I bought some shitty coffee that I was going to regret drinking later. But better that than doing something else I'd regret. Like strangling my fucking father in his hospital bed.

I didn't think the doctors liked it when you did that.

I sat on a hard plastic chair and drank my cold plastic-tasting coffee and tried to think about what to do next. If I left now, if I just turned around and walked out of here, then he'd won, hadn't he?

Or had I? I didn't know. I didn't think either of us were coming out of this particularly well.

But I would still win I thought. I'd win because I had Sookie, and I had my kids and I had my life and I hadn't turned into him, hadn't stayed here running through all the women in town and leaving them like I had Melanie. Hadn't drunk so much my heart couldn't take it anymore and it was going to shut down and fucking kill me.

I had fucking won.

And maybe I could be a little magnanimous in victory.

I took a deep breath and walked back to Dad's room. He didn't say anything, he just watched me walk in and sit down. "Tray" I said. "Tray's seven. He built a gun, out of wood. It shoots rubber bands. Mainly at his siblings when they're not looking. His uncle told him how to build it, but mostly he figured it out for himself. He's like you. He's the one that's most like you. He can make stuff, just about anything really."

Dad didn't say anything, so I carried on. "Amelia's a teenager now. She's fourteen. She's, uh…she's a teenage girl. Fuck, I never thought I'd have to be in charge of one of those." Certainly not when I was climbing in Melanie Bowen's bedroom window. "But she's great, most of the time. She's just finding her way. Amelia's like Sookie, she's stubborn as fuck sometimes. She'll do OK."

I looked at Dad. His expression hadn't really changed much, but he was listening. "Felicia's great, she's 11. She's good at everything, soccer, netball, which I had to fucking learn about, just about any sport you could imagine. She wants tennis lessons next summer, and I think she'd be great at that too. She likes it when I'm there, to watch her. We talk about what she should do. Mostly she listens to me." I laughed, and Dad almost smiled. "Sam's nearly nine. His birthday's the day before mine. Sookie always says she shouldn't have to get me another birthday present, ever. He's just…mostly he's like Sookie, I think. He's really good to his siblings. Too good sometimes, I think they take advantage. But he's smart, and he'll do well too. He's really driven. And then there's Pam. She's the baby, even though she's just started school. She'll still always be my baby. She'd hate it if she heard me saying that, though. She thinks she's all grown up now." I smiled thinking how Pam would hate being described as the baby of the family.

I stopped and Dad kind of snorted. "Pam, huh? That was fucking weird choice of name, but then your name choices haven't made sense up to now. So is she like her?"

I shrugged. "Hard for me to say. I never knew her."

"You're like her, so if she's like you then, fuck. Good luck to the poor guy she marries." He nodded to himself, but didn't say anything and we sat there for a while until I noticed he'd gone to sleep, and I left.

It took three more days for him to die. Three more days of sitting beside his bed, mostly in silence, sometimes with him telling me what a shit I was, or what a bitch my mother was. Sometimes I'd tell him about the kids, but he'd never say anything. He never told me he loved me, never said sorry, never acknowledged he was never going to get to know them and he'd fucking missed out.

It was three days of me living in that depressing awful house, staring at Dad's fucking chair every night. Talking to the kids on Skype and trying to find out what was happening while they all fucking talked over each other, and wondering why Sookie just hovered in the background. Three nights of lying there, holding that pillow as the scent of Sookie slowly faded.

And on the fourth night I got the call to say he'd gone. He'd gone and he was never coming back.

I didn't know what to do. They didn't want me at the hospital; it was over as far as they were concerned. They'd known it was coming, they'd known not to resuscitate him. They just wanted to get on and do their jobs.

But I couldn't sleep any longer. I walked into the living room. All of a sudden that chair, that fucking chair that was older than I was, it just seemed wrong. It seemed wrong that it was still here and my father was gone and he was never coming back. He was never going to tell me that it was OK that she took the fucking blender, that we'd be OK, that it would all work out alright because we had each other.

It was over. And I felt empty.

It took me a while to drag the chair through the kitchen, and it got stuck in the back door for a time when I tried to push it out.

But I wanted it out of the house, and I wanted it out of the house now.

So I pushed it and I tried another angle and I fucking thought about taking an axe to it, but I got it through in the end. The drink helped, I think. It certainly meant I didn't feel it when I pushed the thing over and it landed on my foot. Bourbon's fucking great for that. And why shouldn't I fucking have a drink? It was what Dad would have wanted, after all. He would have expected a fucking final farewell that was no fucking different to how he'd lived his fucking life. Fucking drowned in fucking alcohol.

Fuck knows, I could do that for him.

When the chair was finally out in the backyard I wasn't sure what to do next. I sat on the steps and just looked at it. And I had a drink. And another. And another.

And then I went and got the fucking matches.

Setting fire to that chair, it was like a weight lifted off me. I didn't need the alcohol anymore. I threw the bottle on the flames and watched as they shot up into the air.

I was free, and it felt awful and wonderful all at the same time. And scary. It felt fucking scary.

"Goodbye Dad." I took a deep breath, and I listened to the sirens in the distance.

**Thanks for reading!**


	27. Chapter 27

**A/N So here it is Auckland Anniversary day and we're all a bit hot and bothered. So I'm avoiding the sun in the heat of the day to finish this off before I melt completely. Thanks again to everyone reading this, and to everyone who comments. I really appreciate it, almost as much as I'd appreciate a large, cool drink about now. But sadly my toddler only brings imaginary cocktails. Not quite the same!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

SPOV

When I got the call from Eric to say Stan had passed away he sounded tired and drained and you could hear the toll it had all taken on him in his voice. I wished I was there with him, I really did. It was awful to hear just how bad he was over the phone and not be able to see and touch him.

However, that wasn't going to be a problem for long.

Eric sighed. "I should get to bed. There'll be a lot to do in the morning. I'll have to ring Dad's lawyer, I guess…" then he paused. "Where are you?" he asked sharply, probably in reaction to all the noise going on in the background.

"Um…" I said, as I watched Sam chase Tray through a party of Japanese tourists, nearly bowling over some of the elderly people. I hoped they'd said sorry. "At the airport."

"Mum, can I go and get a hot chocolate? Mum!" Felicia said, waving her hands in front of my face. I waved at her doing the universal mum-signal for 'not right now, I'm having a very important conversation'. Somehow though, that always got interpreted by the kids as 'you can do what you like, I'm not moving from this spot, so act quickly and you'll get away with it before I realise you've done it.' Yeah, they used that to their advantage every bloody time.

Of course I didn't feel like I'd been that much better, now I was confessing to Eric about where we all were. It was meant to be a surprise, but whether it was going to be a nice one, or something he wished I hadn't done, that still remained to be seen.

"Why?" Eric asked.

"Because we're coming. To see you." I couldn't blame him for being a bit slow on the uptake; by all accounts he'd had a rough night of it.

"Oh" Eric said, and then he didn't say anything for a while. I wanted to get the conversation going again so I could get off the phone, I had kids to round up and a plane to catch and Pam was back chatting to the girl giving away free samples of perfume again and I was worried it was going to be like sitting next to a department store beauty counter by the time we actually boarded.

But I couldn't rush him. It was a lot to process, on top of what he was already processing.

And it appeared he wasn't processing anything at all at the moment.

"To see me?" he said, eventually.

"Yeah…well, it's school holidays in a couple of days and so I thought we could. Come over. Help out. I mean, there's no classes for me to run for those two weeks either, and I've told Judith she can do all the admin this time around. And clean the equipment down. So, well, you know. Pam wanted to see the States. It was really her idea." OK, that was kind of mean. It wasn't all her idea, but Eric liked Pam and she was little and cute and I'd get her to sell the idea to him, I was sure of it.

"Pam wanted to come?" Eric said slowly. He'd clearly had quite a bad time of it, and he sounded a bit bewildered by my decision. I wasn't sure whether that was good, bad or indifferent at this point.

"Mmm-hmm, you know how she's bitter about the trip to Disneyland before she was born. I did say though we wouldn't be going there this time. But she could see the States. And, you know, we, uh…we missed you." I'd missed him terribly. I almost hated it when he'd call over Skype and I'd have to see his face and know I couldn't touch him. The only thing that had kept me going was my secret project.

"How'd you do it all? So fast?" Yeah, Eric had been able to get a one-way ticket pretty quickly, but then he had the correct passport to get in without questions. The rest of us needed return tickets to show we weren't going to run off and live there forever. As if.

"Well" I said, kind of pleased I could show off how clever I'd been. "First I tried Holly, you know, Chloe's mum. One of them. Anyway, she's been working in the I.T. department at Air New Zealand, but she couldn't really help because she's just a contractor, and you know, contractors don't exactly get the same stuff full-time staff do."

"Uh-huh" Eric said when I paused.

"So then I remembered there's this mum at my Tuesday class, her son is…um, yeah, Shea must be 9 months now? He's a big boy. But the mum, Lorraine, she owns a House of Travel franchise. So I asked her about it, and she booked it all for me. Probably because she wants to move Shea to the Wednesday session next term and that one's pretty booked up for the Crawlers, but I think I can probably get her in. Actually, I'll have to email Judith to get her in. I left her in charge of all of that stuff."

Eric was silent for a bit. "OK" he said.

"See!" I said. "I know people. Now I just have to figure out how to get them all on the plane in one piece, and without losing anyone. I haven't seen Felicia in a while…oh, there she is. And then, you know, just get them to sit down for 12 hours. That's always exciting."

"Fifteen hours, Sookie" Eric pointed out, helpfully.

"Yeah. Fifteen" I said, feeling a bit less enthusiastic about the whole thing now. It'd be worth it in the end, but right now, sitting at the airport and watching Tray and Sam try to murder each other, Pam drench herself in as many different fragrances as possible, Felicia hover round the mobile phone store, and Amelia sit and send a thousand and one text messages to Riley, glaring at me after every one, yeah, fifteen hours was going to be a long time.

"OK, so what you do is this" Eric said, suddenly sounding more awake and alert than he had since I'd answered his call.

EPOV

It had been one of the shittiest nights of my life, and also one of the more surreal. And then I called Sookie and found she was on her way to board a plane to come here. No one in our family ever stayed where you had left them for more than about five fucking minutes, so in some ways, I shouldn't have been that surprised. But Sookie was normally pretty reliable. When we went to the mall at St Luke's, if she said she'd finish in Kmart and meet me at the café, then that was where she ended up. She didn't randomly wander into the supermarket instead.

OK, sometimes she did. But she got to the café in the end.

So I just hadn't been expecting this particular bit of news. Although I missed them. I missed them all so much. And I wasn't sure I could do it by myself. I thought the worst part would be watching Dad die, but now, now there just seemed so much to do. I couldn't walk away and get on a plane and pretend it wasn't happening. I had to…fuck, there had to be a funeral, didn't there? And I had to sell the house, and decide what was going to happen with all the other stuff around here, and the garage was…well, there was a lot of fucking stuff in the garage. Fuck. It was kind of overwhelming. I couldn't even think about it.

So it was good to have something else to think about. I could worry about Sookie dealing with five kids on a long flight for one thing. And I could do what I could to help her with that.

SPOV

By the time we were boarding the flight I had a strategy that didn't involve tying the kids to their seats and feeding them sleeping tablets, which I had been considering earlier in the evening, so that was a bonus. Because the whole idea was to look like I was in control of my five kids, even if I really wasn't. I didn't want to be the mum that everyone on the plane looked at and tutted and whispered to each other about as her kids acted like savages.

So Eric had given me some ideas. Discussing what to do with the kids had perked him up, I think, and given him something else to focus on.

And now, all I had to do was put the plan into action. If I could get the kids on the plane. We were currently in the departure lounge at our gate, waiting to board.

"Mum!" Felicia said. "They've called for parents with small kids, so come on, let's get Pom-pom on-board." She grinned at Pam who looked less than impressed.

"I'm not a baby!" Pam huffed. "Mum! Tell her I'm not a baby! Everyone else going on has babies with them!"

"No, she's not a baby, and no, they don't want us to get on the plane yet" I said. They probably didn't want us on the plane, ever, but they didn't have a choice.

"See!" Pam said, but Felicia ignored her and turned her attention to Sam. "What are you looking at?" she said, belligerently. Sam just shrugged in a way he could guarantee was going to annoy Felicia.

"Just behave" I warned them, and then they called for the section of the plan we were sitting on and I got everyone to stand up, gather up all their belongings, and join the queue.

At least we'd got through customs OK. There'd been that awful moment as we put our hand luggage on the conveyer belt to be x-rayed and I'd worried that maybe I hadn't checked Tray's bag thoroughly enough because I could see the people watching the monitor discussing something quite seriously, and glancing over at us. Sure I'd checked for the rubber-band gun, but maybe I should have been looking for other things as well. How likely was it, I wondered, that Tray had brought along his pencil case? And his compass?

But no, it turned out they were checking out the stupid woman travelling with five kids by herself. One of the customs people asked me if 'it was just me' as I was trying to collect the backpacks and hand them to various kids who now all thought they'd been freed from carrying anything.

"Yep" I said, kind of tersely, waving Amelia's backpack at her as she stood there, ignoring me and clutching the phone she'd managed to retrieve all on her lonesome.

"Wow. Good luck" the woman had said.

But I didn't need luck, because now I had a plan. Well, Eric and I had a plan; I was just in charge of executing it. But I was feeling pretty confident as we walked down the gangway, well, I walked, Pam skipped, Sam and Tray ran, Felicia power-walked and Amelia did a weird kind of shuffle which was supposed to tell me she really hated me about now. It was all good.

I handed over the boarding cards to the purser who was currently being quizzed by Pam about the fact she was wearing a scarf and did she always wear a scarf because that scarf was kind of pretty, and then I tried to listen to where our seats were over the din of Sam and Tray daring each other to storm the cockpit, and then I headed to where I thought our seats were anyway.

"OK" I said, trying to get everyone's attention, and then I told them all where they were sitting amongst much sighing, and eye-rolling and behaviour that generally held up everyone else trying to get on the plane at that point, but they weren't my problem. My problems had to be arranged carefully in order to minimise the amount of dramas those people were all going to have to witness in about two hours' time. They might be a bit pissed off at not being able to get on the plane as quickly as they liked now, but they'd thank me later.

I hoped.

"OK, Pam you get the window…"

"I get the window! Oh! I get the window! Ha!" Pam was ecstatic. She never got the window seat in the car and she had a bunch of craft stuff and colouring in to keep her occupied, so she'd be fine wedged in there. Plus, as Eric and I had agreed, she'd be asleep about thirty minutes after take-off anyway.

"Then me, and then Felicia, you're on the aisle."

"Whatever!" Felicia said, plonking herself down. Yeah, originally I had intended her to sit with one of the boys and keep them separated, but as Eric had pointed out, Felicia would behave if she was left to her own devices. The boys fought, but normally calmed down again quickly. Felicia held grudges. And wasn't above trying to provoke a reaction if she got bored.

So we weren't going to be sitting in exactly the seats we'd been assigned by the airline, but I figured stuff it, if we went down in a big ball of flames then Eric would have bigger problems than the fact that some of Amelia might be mistaken for some of Pam.

That was gross thought, and I shrugged it off and went on to the next aisle. "Sam, you've got this window, and then Tray, which means that Sam, you help Tray with the entertainment stuff, OK? And I'll give you the food to hand out?" We'd figure out Tray would behave for food, Sam would behave if he thought he was doing it to set a good example for Tray, and Eric assured me that both of them would be fine if I just didn't look at what they were watching or playing on the in-flight entertainment system. "After all" Eric had assured me, "they edit all that stuff so it's not that bad."

"Mmm" I said, not wanting to mention that time Sam got part-way into 'a movie about cowboys' before anyone noticed it was _Brokeback Mountain_. It was only Eric's panic that he would have to explain that one which meant that Sam was made to change over to something else. But I was willing to give the whole hands-off approach a go; if it meant that they just sat quietly and didn't want to run around the plane.

And that left me with my biggest problem, Amelia. Amelia had been less than impressed with the whole idea of the trip. "But Mum!" she'd complained, when I'd first suggested it. "I had plans for the holidays!"

"What plans?" I'd asked.

Amelia had shrugged, and sighed. "Well, you know" she'd said. "I was going to hang out. With Chloe. Maybe with Riley. Stuff like that."

"You can hang out anytime" I said. "Right now, Daddy needs us."

Well, that hadn't sold it to Amelia who was still holding a grudge. "Amelia" I said, "you get the aisle seat next to Tray, and then you can talk to the cabin crew when they come through, get meals for the boys and stuff. Plus you can get up easier that way, walk around." Amelia looked a little mollified at that, and I was grateful Eric had suggested it. Sure, he and I knew there was nowhere to go on a plane, but Amelia liked the idea of being the grown-up allowed to wander at random when and if she pleased. Even if I knew she'd spend the whole time composing long heart-felt emails to Chloe and Riley telling them all about how lame her family were. It was the idea that counted.

Once everyone was settled I got them to take off their shoes and the important stuff they needed out of their backpacks and I had to get the stuff stored in the overhead lockers. I really missed Eric at that point. I had to balance one foot on the seat to get enough height to really jam the stuff in there. Sam decided to help and actually climbed on the arm of Amelia's seat to put stuff away, which made me worry that he'd fall and crash into one of the other passengers but he managed OK, despite the fact Amelia spent the whole time hissing "Your foot is where I want to put my arm! Sam! Your foot is where I want to put my arm!"

Only after we'd got everything put away did the stewardess turn up to help. Of course she did. If we'd had Eric here she would have been hovering from the get-go. But that didn't matter. I was doing OK at this travelling with kids thing and I wasn't going to let her put me off.

Of course what nearly put me off was trying to help Pam with her craft. I'd bought her a little kit of some kind of sticky string stuff you could use to make pictures and models of kittens and puppies. It was mind-numbingly boring and Pam wanted to make every illustration they had in the pack and some of them were clearly out of my league, and every so often we'd drop a bit and have to search around under seats looking for it.

But other than the fact that Pam was very much wide awake and not sleeping as predicted, everything seemed to be going according to plan. I thought Eric and I had done quite well, really.

EPOV

The morning after Dad died I was pretty much in autopilot. I got up and then I just sat there, for a long time, in the living room. Staring at the spot where Dad's chair used to be. The carpet was a different colour underneath it. I wondered exactly how long since it had been moved.

I knew there were things I should be doing, calls I had to make, but I just couldn't do them. Not quite yet. I felt…well, I didn't know what the fuck I felt. It couldn't be grief because I'd been waiting for the fucker to literally go to hell for years now. So I wasn't in mourning for him, I was sure of it.

But all the same I just felt fucking empty. It was an awful, shitty feeling and I hoped it would go away soon. I thought that maybe doing something, actually making one of those phone calls would make it stop, but I couldn't seem to get the energy together to actually do it.

I must have sat like that until two o'clock in the afternoon. Maybe later. And then something snapped. I wasn't going to be him. I wasn't going to fucking waste my life away sitting in this shithole wishing things were fucking different and never doing anything to change them. I wasn't going to repeat the same pattern.

After all, I'd broken free of him once before. How much harder could it be when he was actually dead and there was no one to fight?

That thought actually got me fucking worried. I'd done everything I could not to be defined by him and what he was, but maybe without him I wouldn't be the same? If I had no one to prove myself to…fuck. I didn't know.

But I did. I had Sookie. I had the kids. They counted on me. And they were coming…soon. Although there was a part of me that felt as though that phone call had all been part of some bizarre dream, like the whole evening had been a bizarre dream even though I had the charred remains of a fucking La-Z-Boy in the backyard to prove it wasn't.

So I showered. I dressed. I called the lawyer and left a message. I called the funeral home the hospital had suggested and made an appointment for the following day. I got a text from Sookie to say they'd landed which proved that my night definitely wasn't all a bad dream. I sent her a text back saying 'drive safe' and then I thought I might go to the store and get something to eat that wasn't pizza or cornflakes.

And fuck it; I might take Dad's car.

SPOV

The flight did drag on and on. Fifteen hours is a long time. It takes a lot out of even the best families I would think, and ours was no exception. The only bright spot was that not long after take-off Amelia spotted a free seat near the front and asked the stewardess if she could have it "Because my little brothers have B.O. and my mother is making me sit here with them." The stewardess took pity on her and told her she could move, before turning to me and saying "My girls are 16, they're twins. Some days I think that's my punishment for how I was as a teenager. Oh well." And then she left to deal with someone who needed another glass of water.

So Amelia was up the front playing grown-up by herself and I only had the four to manage. Felicia and Pam got a bit annoyed that Sam and Tray got the extra space and whinged a bit, and I had to admit that the extra space was a bit of a pain when it gave them more room to take a swing at each other, but when I had to enforce a separation ban after the second meal had been served and Tray got especially annoying, I was grateful for the seat they had in between them.

However, the flight was possibly the easy bit. What came next was getting to Eric. Although first we'd had to clear U.S customs and they all looked at me a bit funny when I said we were here because my husband's father had died and he was the U.S. citizen. The woman behind the counter looked me up and down, and I wanted to tell her that I didn't want to stay in her stupid country, and if I did, did she really think I would marry someone, have his kids, live with him for ten years in another country, and then try and sneak in to the U.S.? With all the kids in tow? I couldn't see it happening.

But no, mostly she was interested in the fact it was just me and five kids and whether their daddies were paying child support. Um, OK. Admittedly he was hard to deny the fact there'd been at least one other guy involved in it all when Amelia's passport had a different name, and my surname being different to all of them probably didn't help matters either. But I did think she was jumping to few conclusions. After all, the names were just names and didn't really tell her anything about our lives.

And then came the process of luggage retrieval, which meant stopping Tray bringing me any suitcase he thought maybe looked like one of ours and watching that Sam didn't try to lift anything that was going to make him topple backwards onto one of the trolleys. Pam just stood there shouting "Remember, mine's the pink suitcase! The pink one!"

After that we had to pick up the hire car. Or van, or whatever it was that was going to fit us all plus the suitcases in. In actual fact it wasn't all that different to what I drove in New Zealand, it's just the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car.

"This feels weird" Amelia said, from her spot to my right.

"Yep" I said. Bloody weird. I felt a bit disoriented about the whole thing, and all I had going through my head was 'stay on the right, stay on the right, stay on the right'. It was kind of terrifying.

"Are you _sure_ you can do this? Like, drive in the States? 'Cos maybe we should call Dad?" Amelia asked me.

"No!" I said. "I'm fine. Honestly. It's not that difficult." Well, if Eric and millions and other people could do it, I could do it. I was positive. I just couldn't get the GPS thing to work. "Felicia?" I asked. "Can you figure out what button we have to press on this?"

Felicia sighed, and leaned forward from the back. "I don't think you can switch off the annoying American accent" she grumbled, as she pushed a few buttons.

"No, I just want it to work" I said. "I don't care what accent it has."

Amelia snorted. "And that's how you ended up with Dad in the first place" she said.

"Look, be nice" I reminded her. "He's having a hard time. Just because you're sad that we've had to leave your boyfriend at home by himself during the holidays, don't take it out on me." OK, I might have been a bit mean, but it had been a long day and I was tired.

"Well I don't see why your relationship is more important than mine!" Amelia said. "We're only here because you missed Dad."

"I missed Daddy too!" Pam said from the back, but she got ignored. Felicia hadn't been ignoring Amelia though. "I knew Riley was your boyfriend!" she said, and Amelia blushed and went quiet. "I think that'll do it" Felicia continued, and then she moved back to her original seat, I think. I heard her say "Move, dickbreath!" and then I assumed we were good to go so I started the engine, and put the windscreen wipers on.

"Aargh!" Amelia said in frustration. "We're _never_ going to get there with you driving. You can't even work the indicator!"

"I can!" Tray volunteered. "I could come and work it!"

"You're too little to sit up here" Amelia said, and I ignored all of them and tried to remember which side of the steering column the indicator was actually on. We could do this. I was sure we could.

EPOV

By the time Sookie arrived I was starting to get a bit worried. Sure, she said she could drive in the States, but what if she couldn't? What if she accidentally drifted to the left and the next thing I knew the police were at the fucking door telling me they'd all died at the side of the highway?

Fuck, it was frustrating just waiting. I wasn't sure what to do to fill in the time. Although when they finally got here, I realised what I should have been doing during that time. I kind of wished I'd used that time a bit better.

It was kind of surreal when I walked outside and they all started getting out of the crappy van that Sookie had rented. I was surprised that thing had actually fucking got them here for a start. But then the kids started talking, all at once, and it was like I'd never left them. Like I hadn't been here for nearly a week, by myself, watching my Dad die. It was like home had come to me.

"Mum doesn't know how to make the indicators work!" Tray said, as he clambered over Pam and Sam to get out the door first. "She keeps putting the windscreen wipers on!"

"Ow! Watch out, Fay!" Felicia exclaimed, as he stepped on her foot.

"I know how they work, it's just not what I'm used to", Sookie huffed as she climbed out. "They're on the wrong side."

"Daddy!" Pam squealed, at a pitch that was close to glass-shattering. "I'm in the States! It's so cool!"

"We've seen the road, Pam. Lots of lots of the same kind of road. It's _not _that great" Felicia said, as she clambered down.

"We went to McDonald's, but's it's the same as home. That's OK. Look, I got this cat that lights up!" Pam said, undeterred.

"It's the same as the dog you got from McDonald's last week" Sam reminded her.

"Cats are cooler" Pam said.

"I think Mum's driving was OK" Sam added. "We only took that one wrong turn…" he gave up as Sookie glared at him. "But it was good" he said. "Because, um…we saw that thing…that we wouldn't have seen otherwise…"

"You mean the bit of the airport where they keep all the crappy planes? Yeah. That was awesome" Felicia said, sounding tired and bitchy.

But then, Amelia got out and any bitchiness Felicia might have had was eclipsed by Amelia making her feelings about the whole trip known. "Oh my God! That took, like, _so_ long and I kept thinking that Mum was going to just drive into the other cars because she's, like, really bad at driving on the left. _Really_ bad."

"We were driving on the right, you complete numbskull" Felicia corrected her. "Remember, L is for left." She made an L-shape with her thumb and forefinger and held it up in front of Amelia. "And loser."

"Oh, shut up! Just because you had to sit with Mum on the flight and I got to sit up the front of the plane by myself. Because I'm a grown-up."

"Yeah, but Mum wouldn't leave you home alone, would she? Like you asked? So you could spend all your time kissing Riley and stuff, like, like…well that really…euw that's gross." Felicia seemed to run out of fight on that point and I'd pretty much stopped listening to the kids anyway. Sookie had, finally it seemed, reached me and I just held her. It was fucking nice to be able to hold her again. It was even better kissing her. I'd really missed Sookie.

I'd missed all of them. The wall of noise that had emerged from the car managed to push away some of the thoughts I'd been stuck with all day, and it was kind of nice when they all came and hugged me in turn, after Sookie let go of me. But then when we went inside the house I realised exactly what I should have been doing in that time I was waiting for Sookie and the kids. I should have tidied up, maybe.

"So we're going to have to give this place a good clean, aren't we?" Sookie said, as she followed me inside.

'Yeah" I agreed. "I'm not sure who, if anyone, has been living here with Dad but they haven't exactly been doing much around the house."

"Mmm" Sookie said, as we reached the kitchen and she looked at the stack of pizza boxes on the counter. "And, uh, sleeping arrangements?"

Fuck, I hadn't thought about that one either. I'd been sleeping in my old room, wary of being too near anything of Dad's, but that wasn't going to work now. "Um, well…the boys can have my room…" I said. "There's a double bed they'll have to share. And um…" I'd been sitting there all fucking day trying to avoid making any decisions about anything and now I felt like my brain had seized up or something, I just couldn't figure it out. I looked at Sookie who was standing there, waiting patiently for me to say something and just shrugged. "I don't know" I said quietly.

"OK, well we'll take your Dad's room" Sookie said, as she started walking down the hall leaving the kids to fight over the TV in the living room. "And then, that's your room?" she said, sticking her nose in.

"Yeah" I said, wishing I'd made more of an effort not to let the contents of my suitcase spill everywhere. Or maybe I should have done some fucking laundry. But I had been kind of busy at the hospital…for some of the time anyway. And it wasn't like there was anyone here to see that I'd put dirty laundry in one corner of the room. And I would have done it at some point. So it was fine, really.

Sookie had carried on to the next room anyway. "Um, so there's another double bed in here?" she asked.

"And a single in that tiny room at the back" I confirmed. "So, we could put Amelia and Felicia in here…"

"No, Sookie said decisively. "They'd kill each other at the moment. No, I think we put Pam and Felicia in here, and let Amelia have the room to herself, where she can moon over Riley to her heart's content without Felicia getting in her face about it."

We told the kids where they were sleeping and Sookie was a blur of motion finding sheets and pillows and making sure everyone had brushed their teeth and knew where they were. Most of the fight and energy seemed to have gone out of the kids at that point and there was only a small amount of grumbling from the ones who had to share beds, and a large amount of gloating from Amelia because she didn't. Mostly I just followed Sookie around as she attended to everyone, as though if I let her out of my sight she'd disappear on me. It was still kind of unreal that she was here. Everything was still kind of unreal and I felt like I was drowning and just trying to cling to whatever I thought would fucking save me. Sookie would. She always had before.

But after she'd finally got Tray to go back to bed for the third time after I'd assured him that yes, that did used to be my bedroom when I was his age, and no, I didn't have to share it with anyone, I wasn't sure what to do next. I just stood there, in the room that used to be Dad's and stared at the bed. I really wasn't fucking sure I wanted to sleep in that bed. It felt weird and, I wasn't sure, disrespectful? Or something.

But there wasn't a choice. "OK, let's strip it" Sookie said, as she walked past me.

"I don't know if the other sheets will be clean…" I said. Even if they were I was worried they'd just remind me. Of him.

I didn't fucking want to be reminded of him. Not now. Not ever.

"That's OK" Sookie said, as she pulled the comforter off and put it on the floor. "I brought the rest of the set from home."

"You brought sheets?" I asked, as I took a pillowcase off one of the pillows.

"Well, yeah. You were the advance party with the one pillowcase, I've got the rest!" she said brightly. So we stripped the bed completely and made it up with the ones Sookie had brought from home. "I can't believe you brought sheets" I said, as we climbed into bed and I pulled Sookie close to me.

"Yep" she said, sounding sleepy. "Well you did say that clean sheets make you happy"

"Yeah" I agreed. "Well, something like that. I'm just surprised is all. Not many people pack sheets to come and visit. And squeeze them in their suitcases."

"Phfft" Sookie said, "I bet lots of people do. There'd be tons of women like me around here, pack-rats who like to haul their own stuff when they leave home."

Yeah, Sookie was pretty tired I could tell. Her conversations always got a little bizarre when she was tired. But it was nice, all the same, lying here, talking random shit. I didn't want to stop it just now, so I asked. "Why would there be tons of them around here?"

"Well didn't you all make it to California in those wagon train thingees? I bet you had to pack really carefully on one of those. So there'd be all their descendants wandering around here, somewhere. I don't think I'd be that unique."

"OK" I said. Yep, Sookie was on a pretty bizarre train of thought. "I still think you would have outclassed them all."

"Maybe you're right" she said, snuggling further against me. That was fucking nice. "I did spend all those years watching Mum and Dad pack up the trailer or the boat to go camping. I learned a thing or two. I would have packed us a pretty awesome wagon." She paused for a bit. "But I think we might have lost Tray somewhere over the Rockies. He's really hard to keep track of. He wanders. Still, I'm sure someone out there in a frontier town would find a use for him and his weapons-building ability."

I chuckled and I thought that maybe Sookie had gone to sleep, but instead she said "Tomorrow we'll take the blinds down in the living room and give them a good clean, although I think it might be better without them. More light for one thing, and vertical venetians are pretty dated these days."

"OK" I agreed, happy to go along with any plan Sookie might have. I was out of plans, well and fucking truly.

But I think Sookie had already fallen asleep. So I lay there, holding her and smelling the familiar smell of our sheets and Sookie mixed together and I felt something for probably the first time in that whole shitty fucking day. I felt love.

Maybe it would be OK after all.

**Thanks for reading!**


	28. Chapter 28

**A/N So early this morning Auckland's 1.5 millionth citizen was born, apparently. We're almost like a big city now! The population here is kind of skewed though, 34% of it is in Auckland, and, although it's quite a big city land-wise, there's still an awful lot of empty space around the country where there just aren't people. Sometimes though there's sheep. They've been known to hide. The most famous one was Shrek the sheep who managed to avoid being shorn for six years by hiding out in caves and when captured he caused such a sensation that his eventual shearing was done on live national TV. You can look him up if you're interested.**

**But we're not weird or anything. **

**And enough with the sheep jokes.**

**And this is attempt number two to get this loaded. The site was not my friend today. Must have something against sheep!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, and I don't have any sheep either.**

SPOV

I was lying there, feeling a bit drowsy when it suddenly dawned on me that we weren't at home and I should probably get up and do something constructive. From what I could gather in the time he'd been here Eric had regressed to living like a student. Admittedly the place had a layer of grime that could only come from years and years of neglect and sloppy house-keeping, but I did think that some of those newspapers strewn around looked like they had this week's dates on them.

Eric was snoring slightly and I was kind of glad he was still asleep. He'd looked tired when we arrived the previous night, tired and drawn and a little thin, even though he'd hardly been fending for himself for all that long. Mostly, from what I could gather, using my amazing detective skills and the pile of pizza boxes left in the kitchen, he'd been eating pizza. I wondered how much he'd had to spend in tips.

And then there was a large thump on the bed and Tray's voice said "Dad? Dad?"

"Mmphf?" Eric managed in response. Good, he was awake. I might just play dead and let him deal with Tray I thought. The trip over had taken it out of me, and I was looking forward to only being half of the parenting team for a bit.

"Dad I went in the garage, is all that stuff yours too?" Tray asked.

"Yeah…guess so" Eric mumbled. I felt for him. Tray didn't exactly get how ghoulish it was to be picking over all the stuff here, given he didn't remember the previous occupant. I wasn't exactly sure how Eric felt about being the inheritor of all of Stan's old crap, but I supposed it was actually all his now.

God, I hoped none of it was coming home with us. I might have been able to pack for six people and squeeze in things like Amelia's very important homework assignment, my sheets and Pam's purple unicorn Pillow Pet, but honestly, I would have to draw the line somewhere.

"Cool" Tray said. "And what's under that cover sheet thing? That's yours too? Hey, you've seen it, eh? What's under the sheet?"

And all of a sudden I was wide awake. A whole bunch of thoughts raced through my brain. How much did I really know about Stan? Where had all those women who'd lived here gone? How likely was it that he was actually a serial killer? And Eric was covering for him? What had Tray seen? Why wasn't Eric worried like I was?

I sat up in bed and looked at Eric who was still lying there. "It's sooo cool, Mum!" Tray said, excitedly. No, I thought, dismembered women are not cool.

Eric rolled over. "Yeah" he said slowly. "It's cool." OK, well that explained where Tray got it from. Please tell me I wasn't going to be scrubbing blood off of concrete. God, I'd need a bucket of bleach.

"Can we go out in it?" Tray asked, and I realised I might be on the wrong track. What the hell had he seen in the garage?

"Yeah" Eric said again. "Later on though. When I'm up."

"Not now?" Tray asked.

"Not now" Eric confirmed.

"And I can sit in the front?" Tray asked, and I finally twigged. It was a car. Of course, other people kept cars in their garages and not a large and varied collection of bikes and scooters, spare climbing equipment for Jumping Beans, garden implements and all the old crap we hadn't got rid of yet. Occasionally Eric would get fed up and push everything to the sides and manage to squeeze his car in there, but then he'd get fed up with trying to drive past a gaggle of kids and pets who gathered in the driveway to greet him each night, and he'd go back to just leaving the car in the driveway and the crap would spread into the centre of the garage again.

"There isn't a back Tray. Not in that car" Eric said, and Tray's face lit up.

"Cool" he said, and he ran off. Probably to tell Sam what Eric had promised because in about a minute Sam arrived and walked straight to Eric's side of the bed. "I can go too" he said to Eric, without any other form of greeting.

"Yep" Eric said, not opening his eyes and not even rolling over to face Sam. "I'll take you out too."

"Awesome" Sam said, and then he ran off. Well it all kind of made sense to them, I guessed, and I decided I might leave Eric to it and get myself up and moving. The ensuite bathroom was a little dire, with its floral-patterned tiles and a toilet bowl that wasn't going to be redeemed with even a bucket of bleach. Ugh. I wondered how much new toilets cost.

The shower wasn't much better and the doors on the shower box had definitely seen better days. There was a lot of mould. I wasn't sure whether I felt cleaner or not having showered in it, but needs must I figured. When I was dry and dressed I tip-toed through the bedroom, past the now-snoring Eric and into the hallway, where I could hear voices coming from the kitchen.

"No, that's not it" Amelia said. "_That's_ it. That button."

"No it's not" Felicia argued. "That one. We push that one."

"Well if it blows up, I'm blaming you" Amelia said.

"Why would it blow up, Ames? Seriously, do you even pay attention to anything they teach at school?"

"It's hot" Amelia said. "Hot water…so there's steam, right? And that…you know…like trains…"

"Oh, my God you are so dumb" Felicia said, dismissively.

"I am not!" Amelia said, sounding indignant. "_You _weren't going to put the filter thingees in there. _I_ knew we had to put the filter thingees in there. It's not like the one at home."

"I know it's not like the one at home, Ames, because I know how to work the one at home for a start but this piece of shit is a complete pain in the arse."

"You do?" Amelia asked.

"Yeah, Dad showed me."

"Well, why weren't you making coffee when he was away?" Amelia asked.

I walked in just in time to see Felicia shrug. "I don't drink coffee. Plus, no one asked me." She fiddled again with the coffee maker and then peered to look at it. "Drips!" she said. "It's dripping. I am awesome!"

"It wasn't all you" Amelia said. "Remember the filter thingees?"

"Whatever!" Felicia said, waving a hand at her sister.

"Hello" I said to them, but they basically ignored me and carried on glaring at each other. Pam, who was standing on a stool watching the toaster, turned around though. "Mom!" she said. Great, we hadn't been here for 24 hours yet and her vocabulary was already changing. "What's this?" she thrust a jar at me.

"Jelly" I said.

Pam frowned. "No, that's not right" she said. "It _says_ jelly, because I read that, but it's in a jar, not a little box…so…" She looked up at me, waiting for my answer.

"Well" I said. "It's like a kind of jam, that they call jelly. Here. Just to fool us."

"Huh" Pam said. "So…it's better than jam?"

"It's just different. It's like, um, you know all those books? Where they're always eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Well that's the jelly they're using."

"Really?" Pam asked. "Not wobbly jelly?"

"No, not wobbly jelly."

"It would wobble right out of a sandwich, Pom-pom" Felicia said, looking away from the coffee-maker.

"Where are the cups?" Amelia said, opening cupboards at random. "Why are there no freakin' cups?"

"They're there" Felicia said, pointing to a cup stand. "On the bench."

Amelia huffed, and picked one up and looked inside. "It's all…grotty" she said, thrusting it at me.

"Well, I'll wash them then" I said, and I busied myself filling the sink, after I'd given that a good wipe down, and washing all the cups on the stand. Drying them was a bit of a problem because the tea-towel hanging up on a hook looked grimy. I went into the hall to have a search through the linen cupboard for something a bit nicer and I could hear a lot of commotion coming from the room the boys were staying in. I stuck my head around the corner and from what I could tell, they were busy emptying the wardrobe. There were toys from one end of the room to the other. Huh. He might have had a crappy childhood, but it didn't seem like Eric had exactly missed out on anything. Maybe that had been Stan's way of dealing with him?

"You guys alright?" I asked them, and I got a nod from Sam and Tray held up some kind of particularly lethal looking gun-thing. Terrific. I left them to it.

I guessed Stan didn't believe in getting rid of things, judging from the amount of Eric's stuff that still lurked in his old room, and the linen cupboard wasn't much better. I'd had a hard enough time trying to find sheets the night before, and trying to find a tea towel was just hopeless. In the end I settled for an old, slightly stained but otherwise clean hand towel and took that back to the kitchen.

"I need a cup!" Felicia said, as soon as I walked back in, so I dried one and handed it to her so she could pour some of the coffee into it. "There" she said when she'd done that.

"You haven't filled it up" Amelia said, "Dad doesn't like it if it's not filled up."

"Do you think I should put just the jelly-jam on, or should I put peanut butter on as well? Or just peanut butter?" Pam said, looking at me for the answer.

"Well, whatever you want to eat" I said to her.

Pam frowned. "But it's not for me…" and then she trailed off as Eric shuffled into the kitchen, still looking tired despite the extra sleep. It was pretty clear he had given up shaving a while back, but I wasn't about to bring that up. We'd have to go to a funeral pretty soon and I was sure he'd want to shave for that.

Well, I hoped he would.

Eric gave us all a half-smile, and then he sat down at the little table in the centre of the kitchen. "Morning Daddy!" Pam said, brightly. "I made you toast!" She plonked a plate of toast down in front of Eric, each piece covered in jelly about an inch thick.

"Here's some coffee" Felicia said, passing him the cup.

"Felicia didn't know about the filters. I knew about the filters" Amelia said. "_And_ I found the cups."

"Well, this is great. Thanks guys" Eric said, with maybe just a tiny bit of forced enthusiasm. But he sat there and he ate his breakfast under the watchful gaze of his daughters. I hadn't realised they were quite that worried about him, but it was pretty clear they wanted to help and weren't sure what else to do. It was both a sobering and a comforting thought that if anything ever happened to me I could feel secure in the knowledge that Eric had at least three other people who would all rally around and look out for him.

So I figured he was in safe hands, and poured myself a cup of coffee and went to look out the window at the backyard, thinking I might assess what needed to be done out there as well. And then I saw the most bizarre sight. I had vaguely registered that Stan's chair had been missing from the living room, but I certainly hadn't expected to see it sitting by the fence, blackened by fire. If there'd been a fire in the house though, there was no other sign of it.

Eric must have figured out what I was looking at because he came to stand next to me, holding his own cup. "What happened to the chair?" I asked.

"I, uh, burned it" Eric said. I turned to look at him, but he kept looking straight ahead out the window. He seemed remarkably nonchalant for someone who'd nearly killed himself by having a fire in the house, although I realised when I turned back to look outside myself, he hadn't done anything in the house, because I could see the scorch marks on the grass just beyond the back steps. Huh.

"You burned it?" I asked, slowly. It still seemed a bit weird that he'd done that on purpose.

Eric sighed. "Yeah" he said quietly. "I just…it seemed like a good idea. At the time. After…um, after Dad died…" Well, it seemed an odd way of mourning, but it spoke volumes about Eric's state of mind at the time. I was kind of glad we'd come over here to be with him. I put my arm around his waist and leaned against him.

"OK" I said. "So, um, you managed to put it out OK then?"

"Fire department came" Eric said. "They put it out."

"And…you weren't in trouble?"

Eric shrugged. "The cop that came knew Dad. And apparently I went to school with the guy who's the fire chief now." He gave a brief laugh. "Fuck, that's weird. He was a fucking psycho in high school. But they cut me some slack, I guess. I just got a fine, told not to do it again, all the usual shit."

Um. I wasn't sure whether I should be worried or not that Eric was brushing off the police turning up at the door and issuing fines and warnings as 'all the usual shit'. But at that point Tray arrived on the other side of Eric, happy he'd tracked his dad down.

"That chair got burned" he said, pointing out the window.

"Yeah" Eric agreed.

"Weird. Hey, can we go in the car now? Please?" He looked up at Eric pleadingly.

"Just hang on, buddy" Eric said. "I have to have a shower first…and answer my phone." Off in the distance Eric's phone was buzzing. He patted Tray on the head, and walked out of the room.

"I'm going in the car! I'm sitting in the front!" Tray said to his sisters excitedly.

"Whatever, dude" Felicia said dismissively, while Amelia didn't even look up from the coffee she was making herself.

"What car?" Pam asked.

"The cool one" Tray said. "The cool one in the garage."

"You've been in the garage? I want to go in the garage!" Pam announced, and she stalked out the back door and down the steps.

"I don't want to go in the garage" Amelia said. "I want to go…I don't know, what's around here? Is there a mall?

"I don't know" I said, "But today we have bigger things to tackle anyway. We're cleaning."

"Terrific" Amelia said under her breath, while Felicia looked like she might bolt from the room.

EPOV

It was still kind of weird to have the kids and Sookie in the house with me. And when I found Sookie staring at the burnt chair in the back yard I realised there were a few things I should have hidden from her, but I just didn't have the energy to hide it anymore. Let her see every fucking shitty thing around here.

Dad's lawyer called and set up an appointment for the afternoon and then I had a shower and realised I felt a lot better than I had since I got here. And that was wrong, surely, because I hadn't even buried Dad yet. But fuck, it was better when they were all here with me.

When I came back out of the bedroom, Sookie was in the living room, standing on a chair, examining the way the blinds were attached. There was a yell from Sam from the bedroom, and a lot of thuds and knocks. "What are the boys doing?" I asked Sookie.

"Emptying out your wardrobe" Sookie said. "I think they've found all sorts of treasures. Hope you haven't stashed any porn in there or anything!" she said, not taking her eyes off the blinds.

Fuck. What was in that closet?

Sookie looked at me and caught my expression. "I was joking" she said.

"Yeah…I think we're good" I said, trying to remember. "I'm pretty sure it's all gone…" Sam came running into the room carrying something. "What's this?" he demanded.

"PlayStation" I told him. He screwed his face up, like I had to be wrong. "No…it's...that's not a PlayStation."

"Yeah it is" I assured him. "It's just an older one."

"Really?" Sam asked.

"Really."

"Wow, so it's like…that old? Like as old as you?"

"Not as old as me, just older because it was mine. It doesn't work though." I think Dad had maybe said he'd take a look at it, but I remembered it just sitting there, gathering a lot of dust.

"OK" Sam said, "I'll tell Tray." Sookie giggled from her perch on the stool. "Jeez, you're _old_!" she teased.

Sam ran off and a couple of seconds later Tray ran in. "Car now!" he said.

"Car now" I confirmed.

"What's so special about the car?" Sookie asked.

Tray looked at his mother like she was some kind of alien from another planet. "It's a Corvette, Mum. And it's old, so…that makes it even better. Plus I get to sit in the front."

"OK" Sookie said, "Well, have fun."

Tray and I walked to the garage, although he ran there and had the cover half off the car before I'd even got there. "This's going to be _so _cool!" he announced. Yeah, it was kind of Tray's dream come true. The only book he'd ever really been interested in was an old book of sports cars that he'd got me to buy him from the second-hand bookstall at the school fair one year. He still loved that book, but you couldn't fucking get him to read any of the books he was supposed to for school.

I opened up the garage door and then realised I was going to have to move Sookie's piece of shit rental before we could leave. "Just sit in there and don't touch anything" I said to Tray, who nodded solemnly and ran his hand along the dashboard. Fuck, he loved that car almost as much as Dad had.

I got the keys for the van and reversed it onto the street, during which time Sookie and Sam came out to watch us leave. "Is that it?" Sookie said, as I walked back to the Corvette. "It's just a car." She came over to put her head inside the passenger window. "It's not that different to the Toyota Celica I used to have. In the days before I had kids and I discovered the joy of driving everywhere in a city on wheels."

"It's not, Mum. It's really not" Tray said, sounding disgusted by his mother's comparison. He wasn't wrong. Dad's 1978 Corvette was really nothing like a Toyota Celica and I had spent many years hoping for a fucking ride in this car, always being told one day, one day he'd fucking take me out in it. But he never fucking did. This car had been his fucking pride and joy since before I was born and no way was he going to let me fuck it up. And if any of the girlfriends touched it then that was a sure-fire ticket for them to be fucking kicked out on their ass. Mostly he just used it for hooking up with the women in the first place, once he'd got them then he didn't bother so much with trying to pretend he was going to show them a good time, it was back in the garage for the Corvette and he stuck to using whatever shitty sedan he also owned at the time.

But now, well. Now it was just me and Tray. "OK, ready?" I asked him.

"Yep" Tray said, and we slowly drove down the driveway as he waved enthusiastically to Sookie and Sam. "This is the best day _ever_!" he said, as we turned into the street and I accelerated towards the stop sign at the end.

"Yeah" I said. "It's not fucking bad." And it wasn't, I didn't really feel like I was drowning anymore, definitely more like I was treading water. I just had to keep my head up and it would be OK.

SPOV

Eric and Tray disappeared out in the sports car that had been hiding in the garage and Sam looked a bit lost. "It'll be your turn soon" I said.

"Yeah" he said wistfully. I still couldn't see the appeal of the car. Sure, it was pretty, and painted a nice bright red that would have been really good as a nail polish colour, but it was just a car after all. And a totally impractical one at that.

"Why don't you help me scrub the blinds?" I suggested, and Sam screwed his face up at that. "Do I have to?" he asked.

"Well, no. Just if you're bored."

"Oh. No. I'm not bored" he assured me and he ran inside.

Pam caught up to me as I was walking back in the backdoor. "Can I go next door?" she asked.

"Next door? What's next door?"

"Miriam's going to show me her sewing machine. She has a sewing machine, a real one. In her room." Pam looked at me and I felt like I was missing a vital piece of information here.

"Who?" I asked.

"Miriam! My new friend!" Pam said, sounding exasperated. "So? Can I?"

"Um…how old is this Miriam?" I asked, slightly worried that Pam might have befriended a little old lady with a lot of cats. I wouldn't put it past her; Pam liked cats and little old ladies if her rapport with Lorena was anything to go by.

Pam sighed. "She's seven, and she has a brother and we think he's a pain in the bum, like Sam and Tray are, and, um…oh! She has a cat. One cat. We have three, although Stan's really just my cat."

"OK. Well, I'll really have to talk to her mother before you can go over there."

"Well do that" Pam said. "Do it now." She looked at me expectantly as if she was trying to will me to just do what she wanted.

"Um..." I said, trying to think about how I was going to get out of having to go next door and explain to the neighbours that their daughter had a new best friend as well as a cat and a sewing machine, and then I glanced at the fence and could see a small dark-haired girl standing next to a woman and pointing at Pam and I. Guess I couldn't.

So I walked over to the fence and introduced myself to Miriam and her mother Rachel and tried to pretend that she didn't keep glancing over at the burned chair every few minutes. Guess I lived in the house where all the troublemakers were. Terrific.

But she seemed nice enough, if a little wary of me. And she kept blinking oddly, which I eventually realised was a reaction to when she couldn't understand my accent. Great. I was a potential troublemaker and foreign to boot.

Eventually I negotiated that she could have Pam for part of the day and bring her back after lunch and I went inside to check the washing machine and find that Sam had been replaced with Tray. "Dad said we had to come back and let Sam have a go" he said, dejectedly. "And the PlayStation's munted."

"Uh-huh, well the dryer's a bit temperamental as well…" I said, as I turned the dial, but I realised pretty quickly I was talking to myself and Tray had left the room.

EPOV

By the time both Tray and Sam had been out in the Corvette with me the morning was almost over. "Did you do this? With your dad?" Sam asked me, when I was driving him around town.

"Nope" I said.

"Why not?" he asked and I looked over to see his face screwed up in confusion. Yeah, his life was pretty fucking different that was for sure. I thought about how to explain it all to him, and I just couldn't find the words. What did I say that wasn't going to paint some kind of fucking picture of my childhood as a big pile of shit? And I didn't want Sam to pity me, I really didn't. Plus, it felt wrong to speak ill of the dead. It felt wrong to talk about him at all. He'd never been a part of the life I had with Sookie and the kids and I couldn't see it changing now.

"Just didn't" I said. "Dad was busy."

"Oh" Sam said. "That sucks."

"It did, Sam. It really, really sucked."

When we got back to the house, the front lawn was littered with the blinds from the living room and an abandoned bucket of water where Sookie had obviously been scrubbing them. Inside we were greeted with the sound of Amelia shouting "And I'm glad that I'm not sharing a room with you either!" and then a door slammed. Tray jumped out with a roar, waving a gun that shot those foam rubber things, and he attempted to shoot Sam, but Sam dodged, Tray ran, and Sam took off after him. There was a thud that sounded like a chair going over.

Felicia appeared in front of me and said, "So while we're here, are we getting pocket money in U.S. dollars? Because I need a new phone and Mum said I can't have one duty free."

"We'll see" I said to her.

"Well it would only be fair" Felicia muttered, and she walked off.

I had to admit that as far back as I could fucking remember, this house had never felt so much like home. It was kind of disorienting, like there'd been some weird kind of shift in space and two realities were suddenly merged together. I knew this place, I knew this place really well but I just wasn't used to it being like this.

I walked into the kitchen and Sookie was making lunch, I assumed anyway. "What are we having?" I asked, peering into the frying pan she was standing next to.

"Well, there wasn't a lot of choice" she said. Yeah, that'd be because I got to the store the previous day and realised I knew fuck-all about what to buy to feed seven people. Sookie's lists might have been kind of shitty, but at least they were a starting point.

"But there was the stuff for some fishcakes here" Sookie continued, which was fucking news to me. I hadn't realised that's what I bought. "Tons of tinned fish and potatoes, anyway. So I thought that would do us and I might drive to the supermarket later on."

"OK" I said, pleased that I was getting something to eat other than fucking pizza.

"Where's Pam?" I asked.

"She's having lunch next door. With her new best friend." Sookie pointed to the house next door with her spatula. Fuck. I think they were the people who called the fire department. I hoped she was OK over there. "Some little girl called Miriam, who has a sewing machine. Expect requests for a sewing machine soon."

"It'll make a change from requests for a new phone."

"Well, I said no to that one" Sookie said, as she flipped the cakes over. "I spent all that money on the tickets to get over here so no one is getting anything new for a very long time." Fuck, I felt a bit bad about that. "But it was worth it" Sookie said, and I felt better. "I'm getting somewhere with those blinds and they've been bugging me since we got here." OK, maybe I wasn't the only thing only here that was occupying her thoughts, but I hoped she was pleased she'd come. I was pleased she'd come.

"I'm glad you're here" I said, as I put my arms around her.

"Yup, because otherwise the all-pizza diet would get pretty old pretty quickly."

"It already had" I said, kissing her hair.

"OK, go and round everyone up, I'm going to dish these up" Sookie said, and I went to tell Amelia she had to leave her room and join the rest of us, tell Felicia it was time for lunch and locate Tray and Sam who'd gone kind of silent. I found them in the living room. With the PlayStation that was now, bizarrely, working.

"It's lunchtime guys" I said, but they kind of blanked me.

"Lunch!"

"OK" Sam said, and he put his controller down. Tray reluctantly did the same. "So it works now?" I asked.

Tray shrugged. "I fixed it. While you guys were out in the car" he said.

"Fixed it?" I asked.

"Yeah, there was a loose bit inside. So I fixed it. There's one of those soldering irons in the garage."

"There is?" I asked. Fuck, I had no idea what Dad had kept in there.

"Yeah. And I saw that guy who does _Top Gear_ using one on the other show, so I thought I'd try to fix it. Seems to work." He shrugged.

"So…you just fixed it?" I asked.

"Yeah" Tray said. "I don't really know…it just kind of made sense, you know?" He looked at me. Nope, I didn't know. All that kind of stuff was a mystery to me. Sam gave Tray a look like maybe he thought it should make sense to him too, and it didn't and it bugged him that it didn't. But there wasn't much I could do about that now. At least they had a working PlayStation. "OK, well. Lunch now" I said, and they went to wash their hands. I hoped.

Lunch was fucking good. I'd missed real food, even stuff that Sookie said she just 'threw together' on the fly. She'd started a list though, and I said I could pick up the groceries after my meetings that afternoon.

So after lunch I steeled myself and went to see the lawyer, who confirmed that I was, indeed, the sole beneficiary of Dad's estate. I wasn't sure whether to be pleased by that or not. Did it mean he wanted me to have it, or he just couldn't think of anyone else to give it to? Had it always been that way, or had he been adding in women and taking them out for years? I didn't know, and I didn't want to know. Fuck it. I'd just deal with it now. Sell the house and go back home.

Then I went to the funeral home and spent what felt like far too fucking long making decisions about a memorial service and what type of casket and things I didn't even want to think about. Did I want the casket open or closed? Fuck, I didn't know. And they told me all the inforamtion they wanted to know about Dad's life for the service. Fuck. I realised I knew nothing about him.

I had an idea of someone I could ask. But I wasn't doing that. Fuck her.

They said they'd arrange the death notice including the details of the service and I wondered how I'd tell Dad's family in Texas. I didn't know any of them. Didn't know how to contact them, didn't…fuck. I'd have to go through all his things.

So by the time I left, and after the guy who'd helped me had once again offered his fucking condolences, I felt kind of weighed down by the sheer amount of shit there still was to deal with. The only bright spot was Sookie. She'd help; possibly she'd even know what to do. It was a horrible thought, but she had done this before, after all.

I made my way through the supermarket trying to interpret Sookie's scrawled out list. I thought I got everything. Part-way around some woman I didn't recognise stopped me to say how sorry she was about my dad. I just nodded and hoped she'd leave me alone. I didn't know her from a fucking bar of soap but she knew me and she knew Dad and she was sorry? Why were they all so fucking sorry? Why were they always so fucking sorry? Sorry didn't do jack shit.

When I got back to the house I was hoping for that wall of noise again to push those thoughts away. Hoping that there'd be shouting and yelling and furniture crashing and people needing me to sort their shit out for them. But there wasn't. There was just Sookie.

"So, I had to tidy up the room the boys are in after they trashed it pulling all that stuff out" she said, as I brought the grocery bags into the kitchen. "And I was looking at the stuff you've got on the wall."

"Uh-huh" I said, as I opened up the refrigerator to find a space to put the milk I'd bought. I had no fucking idea we drank that much milk, but the container from the previous day had been pretty much drained already.

"Why do all your certificates have a different surname on them?" Sookie asked, and I stopped worrying about the fucking milk situation.

**Thanks for reading!**


	29. Chapter 29

**A/N OK, so this is kind of short, but I liked where it ended (you may not agree) and I thought it gives you some of what happens next. Now I just need the Great Network Pixies in the Sky to let me post it. They're temperamental little sods.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but most of what I own is a huge pile of unfolded washing that I'm avoiding looking at, so I like this better.**

SPOV

While Eric was out I'd finished scrubbing the blinds down and left them on the front lawn to dry. They looked pretty good, even if I said so myself, but I was in two minds about hanging them back up. On the one hand the big picture window looked so much better without anything blocking the view, on the other hand it remained to be seen how hot it ended up getting in that living room when the late afternoon sun hit that window full force. It could be very stifling.

So we'd do a test and we'd see I thought. And I went in search of someone to tell all my exciting plans to. Only Felicia wasn't interested.

"Uh-huh. Cool, Mum" she said, without really lifting her eyes from her phone. I left her sitting at the table in the kitchen and went in search of other people to talk to.

Sam and Tray were in the living room with the PlayStation. They weren't keen on looking at me either. "I thought Dad said that didn't work" I said to them.

"Works. S'bit crappy though. Graphics are kind of shit" Tray said. He wouldn't look at me either.

Sam glanced at me briefly. "Tray fixed it" he announced, like he expected me to tell Tray off or something.

"You did?" I asked.

"Yeah, just needed…" Tray stopped talking and concentrated on something he was shooting on the screen. "There was a loose wire. I fixed it."

"How?" I asked, and then I waited a bit to see if he'd answer, or if he'd just keep on playing. Eventually he said. "In the garage…there was one of those things for soldering stuff…" He stopped talking again, and kind of leaned to one side with his tongue between his teeth as he tried to get whatever he was watching on screen to do what he wanted it to. "Watch out!" Sam hissed at him.

"So, you were out there, with a soldering iron?" I asked Tray. After about thirty seconds I got a "Yeah. Just a little one, though" out of him, and I gave up. I supposed I should be glad that the chair was still the only thing around here that had been burned.

At a loss for what to do next I went back to the laundry and took the stuff out of the dryer and folded it. I wondered how Eric was getting on with all his appointments. It was a shitty thing to have to do. I remembered when my parents had died, I'd been lucky and Gran had still been around, but even so, I'd felt like I should be doing it myself. Jason was a bit lost really and couldn't face it, so it had just been me.

Well, me and Bill. Back in the days when he was my boyfriend and I was so grateful to have him around. That felt like another lifetime.

Pam came home, full of tales about how great life was next door and the amazing wardrobe Miriam's Barbies possessed. "Tomorrow I'm taking my Barbie over and we're going to make her a dress. I need some fabric though. Have we got any fabric?"

"Um…I'll see if there's something we can cut up for it" I said. I figured there had to be something hidden in one of these wardrobes.

"Really?" Pam asked. "Like, just old stuff?"

"Vintage Pam, it'll be vintage fabric." Or possibly a stained towel, who could tell around here? Pam looked a bit unsure but didn't press further.

At a loss for what else to do while I waited I looked into the room the boys were in, the one that used to be Eric's. It was a mess. Not only had they dragged their own stuff out of their suitcases, but they'd pulled almost everything out of the wardrobe and just left it, lying there.

Well, that'd give me something to do.

So I packed the treasures that had formerly been Eric's away as best as I could. It was weird looking at the board games and comics and guns and Transformers and thinking he'd played with all of this and then just left it behind. Like a clean sweep. After all, he'd arrived with just a suitcase and he hadn't brought all that much back when he'd sold his place in Shreveport. I guess he'd just walked out of here and never come back and didn't bother keeping boxes of old toys for the children he might one day have. Weird.

Well, weird if you were me and you spent a long time storing boxes of doll's clothes that might one day be used again. Maybe not weird if you were Eric.

Although he had brought a lot of bloody t-shirts with him. And he wouldn't get rid of those. There were still some t-shirts lurking in the recesses of that wardrobe. I pulled one out thinking I could use it for Pam's Barbie fashion line, but it was really old and manky.

It would make an awesome duster though. I put that to one side and went back to stacking up board games. I wondered who Eric had played these with if he didn't have siblings. I had Jason to do all that kind of stuff with. Sure, we annoyed each other but at the end of the day if there was nothing better to do you knew you always had that other person to play Monopoly or Battleship or Cluedo with. Eric just had…Eric. I wondered if there'd been any kids living next door when he was a kid? I must ask him I thought.

And when I'd done what I could with the wardrobe, and tidied the suitcases I drifted around looking at the stuff on the walls. The fairly prominent poster of Pamela Anderson was worrying. Eric always said that he hadn't named Pam after her, but I wasn't so sure. Maybe it wasn't a family name at all.

Still, at least I hadn't found any porn in the wardrobe. I wondered if I should check under the bed though. I looked a bit closer at the wall above the desk and realised there were some photos there. They were interesting. Especially the ones with the teenaged Eric with the long hair in them. I hoped Sam didn't look too closely; I didn't need him having a perfectly good excuse to avoid getting his hair cut. He wasn't keen on that concept at the best of times.

And then I noticed there were some certificates pinned up as well, the kind they give out at school to show you've done well. Might be interesting to see what Eric was good at, I thought.

Maths seemed to be the answer to that one. And some weird things they didn't teach at my high school in New Zealand. And then I noticed the names on the certificate. They were Eric's, well, I assumed they were. They all said Eric. They all said Eric Davis.

But he wasn't Eric Davis. He was Eric Northman. I'd seen his passport after all. That was the name on all the documents he'd ever signed; the Civil Union papers, the adoption papers, the applications for birth certificates. Of course he was Eric Northman.

Wasn't he?

And so my plan to tell Eric when he got back that we needed to put a lock on the garage door because I didn't care how small the soldering iron was, it could still do damage was eclipsed by my questions about the name.

Not that it mattered, of course.

But it might have been nice to know.

I went back into the kitchen and Eric arrived home with the groceries I'd asked him to get. He was usually pretty good about stuff I asked him to do.

I wondered how much he was going to like being questioned about his name though.

"Why do all your certificates have a different surname on them?" I asked, when he was half-in and half-out of the refrigerator. I tried to keep my voice as neutral as possible. I hoped I succeeded. Eric was always a bit funny about his past and I learned a while back that asking things directly sometimes didn't get you anywhere. But I was curious.

And maybe a little, tiny bit hurt.

"Um…" Eric said, shutting the fridge door. "Certificates?"

Yeah, that was a tactic the boys liked to use when they were trying to avoid questioning. Just play dumb at all costs.

"In your old bedroom. On the wall. The ones from school which have the name Eric Davis all over them." I figured that was nice and specific and it would be hard to play dumb.

It wasn't, however, that hard to give me the annoyed look with the narrowed eyes which suggested he really didn't want to answer. Tough. I'd had to 'fess up about the courgettes; he could face up to this.

I mean, it couldn't be that bad, could it?

Well, it was hardly like he'd killed someone and gone on the run. If he had, we wouldn't be back here staring at things with his old name on them.

So what could it be?

Eric gave up staring at me, and sighed. "Used to be my name" he said, shrugging, and he plonked himself down on one of the chairs at the table. Right. So we were on to limited information now. Say as little as possible and hope I'd give up.

Was it weird that I knew all his tricks and not that he'd once had a different name?

"So you changed it?" I asked, and then Sam came in and looked from Eric to me and back again. "I, uh…what can I eat?" he asked.

I shoved a bag of biscuits that Eric had bought into his hand and said "Take those." Sam looked at the bag and grinned and then ran off before I changed my mind. So he and Tray would be full of sugar and God knows what else, but I needed to talk to Eric.

Eric however thought that the conversation was over and looked up at me. "What?" he asked.

"You changed your name" I said again.

"Oh. Yeah. When I left home. It's not really a big deal. I mean, it's all legal…so, uh, you know. Well, it was ten years before I met you. Wasn't an issue by that time."

"Mmm" I said, considering. That answered a couple of questions, but not all of them. "So you just didn't like your old name?" I asked.

Eric stared at the wall. "I didn't like…I don't know" he said quietly. "I think I didn't like what it meant…" he stopped talking but was still staring at the wall. If I'd thought it was hard talking to Sam and Tray when there was a PlayStation in the room, then that was nothing compared to this.

Luckily I was nothing if not persistent when I had to be. "Because of your dad?" I asked, sitting down at the table with him so that maybe I'd be harder to ignore. I put my hand on his.

"No" he said, vehemently. Then he paused. "Yeah…I guess. I don't know. Shit. It was a long time ago, Sookie. Twenty years ago."

He had been Northman for over half his lifetime then. Like my mother who'd been a Stackhouse for longer than she was ever a Brigant, or Gran who'd had the Stackhouse name much longer than Hale. It was weird how that used to be the norm for women, grow up using one name, and then give it away as soon as you married.

But it wasn't the norm for me. I'd liked Stackhouse and I'd stuck with it, pleased of the connection it held to my family and the people I'd loved and lost. I even quite liked the fact it marked me out as Jason's sister. As annoying as he might be, he was still my family and I loved him.

I loved Eric too. I just didn't get this reinvention of himself. After all, hadn't he repeatedly said he was always him?

But then your name was only a part of that. Probably not a very important one at that. I'd thought that when the woman at immigration had been quizzing me over child support payments. I'd thought that the different names we travelled under didn't tell her anything about our situation. So what did Eric's name really matter?

"I just…it's just news, I guess" I said to Eric, still holding his hand while he still looked away from me.

"You're mad with me" Eric said, accusingly, in exactly the tone of voice I'd been trying to avoid.

"No, I'm just trying to understand…why it happened, and why, I guess, it was something I didn't know yet. Like you didn't know about the courgettes." That made him at least smile, even if that smile was directed to the wall. "So you just thought it would be better if you weren't a Davis?"

"I just…" Eric stopped, checked himself, took a deep breath and carried on. "They all knew" he said, and I realised this was maybe the story I was missing. "How could they not know my Dad? He was out there drinking with them all the fucking time. All that time and they just…I mean, there wasn't much they could do, I get that now. Where would I have gone? And how much worse would it have been? But they all knew. And I fucking hated it that they knew. And just…the pity. That was awful." He stopped and I didn't say anything, scared that if I just bombarded him with questions he'd clam up again.

"Dad loved that fucking car" he said in the end. "I was never allowed fucking near it. But I took it out, once. I was sixteen and I didn't have a licence yet, but it wasn't that hard to figure out how to drive. So Dad was out and I just got the keys and I took it. And it was the best fucking feeling ever, like I could go anywhere and no one would know. Until a cop pulled me over. The one who knew Dad. And you know what he said?" Eric gave a brief laugh, but there wasn't a lot of laughter in his voice. "He said that it was better it was me driving the Corvette because he'd seen Dad earlier in the evening and he was already fucking drunk. And he just sent me home and told me not to be so fucking stupid again. Fuck, I'd been shitting myself. But that was it. I got let off. Because of my Dad." Eric turned to look at me for the first time, and he looked upset. It was pretty clear he really hated this part of his past. "Sookie, I can't even get arrested in this town. And trust me, I've fucking tried."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, I really didn't. It was all so…bizarre. That you'd let an unlicensed driver go just because his dad was a drunk. Did cops really do that?

"Well…don't test that theory at home" I said to Eric. "I don't think Andy works on that principle."

Eric laughed at that, although I got the feeling he was doing it to humour me a bit. "So why Northman?" I asked. "Why that name?"

"I just liked it. And when I didn't want to be…I don't know, defined by my dad and his choices anymore, what it did matter? Any name was as good as any other really" Eric said. "I just didn't want to be that guy anymore, Sookie. The one who…fuck. The one who kept pushing his luck to see how far he had to go before someone actually fucking noticed him."

"I can't believe they didn't notice you" I said. "You do kind of stand out."

Eric gave me a sad smile. "Not around here, Sookie. Around here I'm just fucking surplus to requirements." And then he stood up and that was the end of that conversation. "What's for dinner?" Eric asked.

"Um…well. You got the minced lamb I wanted?" I asked, and Eric nodded. "So I'm going to do this thing with lamb meatballs in a lemon and butter herb sauce, with some crunchy potatoes. There are an awful lot of potatoes around here."

"That sounds good" Eric said, nodding to himself.

"Yeah, I watched MasterChef while you were away and got all inspired" I said, as I started looking through the grocery bags for what I needed.

"I should go away more often then!" Eric said brightly, and then he kissed my head.

"No" I said, seriously. "You shouldn't." I turned to look at Eric. "This doesn't change anything" I said. "I wish you'd told me, and I'm a little hurt that I had to find out by chance, but it doesn't change anything. You're still you."

"I'm always me" Eric agreed, and then he left the kitchen.

I was pretty sure that in Eric's mind, it did change things. The set of his shoulders and the forced jollity told me that. And whether he thought it was for the better, or the worse, I had no way of knowing.

**Thanks for reading!**


	30. Chapter 30

**A/N And there's more...**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

It fucking blindsided me, Sookie asking about the name. I might have thought that I was ready for it all to come out, but fuck, I didn't know if I really was. I was kind of worried she'd judge me. Harshly.

And I wasn't sure what I was more worried about her judging me on. The fact I felt the need to change my name because my life was so fucking shitty, or the fact I hadn't told her about it in over ten years.

And then there was the fact my life was so fucking shitty. She knew, she had to know…some of it, at least. But I didn't want, well. I just didn't want the fucking pity. I'd had enough of that to last a fucking lifetime.

She told me it didn't change anything. I fucking hoped she meant it.

I left the kitchen and found the boys in the living room, still fucking enthralled with the PlayStation. Yeah, fuck. At the time it had been the best fucking thing and now when you looked at it, it was pretty shitty.

"Still working OK?" I asked, sitting on the couch behind them.

"Yup" Tray said. And then they both ignored me for a bit until Sam turned to me, and said "Do you want a turn?"

"Yeah" I said. I fucking needed something to take my mind off of, well, everything really. The whole fucking day had gone a bit downhill really. And this was a game that I used to be really good at, when it was mine.

Only apparently it wasn't mine anymore. And I wasn't all that good at it. And Sam nearly fucking beat me in the race. A few more days of them playing this non-stop and I might be in serious fucking trouble.

"I think we need to get out of the house tomorrow" I said.

"What are we gonna do?" Sam asked, looking out the window. Fuck, it was bright with the sun coming in. Had it always been that fucking bright?

"Dunno" I said. "We'll think of something."

"We could build something?" Tray suggested. "There's tons of stuff in that garage,"

"What do you want to build?" I asked him.

"Um…how hard do you reckon it'd be to build a car?" Tray asked me. I thought he was joking, but no he was fucking serious.

"You're banned from the soldering iron, so no; we're not building a car."

"I am?" he asked.

"Yeah, you told your mother you used it, she doesn't want you using it again" I explained, and Tray screwed up his face.

"But I fixed the PlayStation" he said.

"Possibly that's the reason why, and you guys have been glued to the thing ever since." They both looked a bit sheepish at that, but didn't say anything. "So tomorrow, we do…something." At that point in time I had no idea what, but I was sure I could come up with a plan before then. It would give me something to think about that wasn't…fuck, all the things I didn't want to think about. They were fucking stacking up.

"I'm bored!" Felicia announced, as she came into the room and landed on the couch next to me with a thud.

"We're doing something. Tomorrow" Sam said to her.

"What?" she said sharply, turning to look at me.

"I haven't decided yet" I said. Mainly because I had no fucking idea.

"Yeah, well. So long as I don't have to go next door to _Project Runway_ with Pam and her new bestie."

"What?" I asked.

"Pam. And her friend with the sewing machine. They've been over there making nothing but bloody doll's clothes today. And Pam is currently trying to get Amelia to hand over her shirt for the good of Barbie fashion everywhere using the argument that 'one day it'll be mine anyway, so I might as well get it now'."

"Is she winning?" I asked.

Felicia said. "It's about even about the moment, but I think Amelia might give up before Pam will. She is a pain in the bum when she wants something."

I nodded. She was fucking persistent, although it sounded as though she might have pushed her luck this time because I then heard Amelia yell "Just keep away from my stuff while it's MY stuff!" and a door slammed. A minute or so later Pam walked into the room. "No one will give me some clothes I can cut up!" she complained.

"I might have a t-shirt you could have" I offered. Fuck, Sookie always said my t-shirts needed to be relegated to rags, so maybe Pam could have one for her dolls.

Pam, however, didn't fucking like that idea. She pulled quite a disgusted face. "Um…yeah, I think my Barbie, wants, um, you know…like girl's stuff…"

"Stuff that isn't already really old like Dad, you mean?" Felicia asked with a grin.

"Um…well, pretty stuff, maybe…" Pam said. "Dad's stuff isn't really that pretty." She looked thoughtful.

"Yuck. Pretty's just…gross" Tray added. Yeah, I'd seen him wipe his nose on his sleeve more than once. He wasn't really about the finer things in life.

"Mum likes pretty things. You should ask her" Sam suggested, as he watched the TV and scrolled through choices on the game menu.

"Yeah, I did, poo-brain" Pam said. "And she said she'd look, but she hasn't."

"She's busy. Making dinner" I said.

"What're we having?" Sam asked.

"Some kind of meatballs apparently" I told him. "She got the idea off MasterChef."

"Oh yeah" he said, changing the colour of the car he wanted, and then changing it back again. "I saw that one."

"Suck-up" Felicia muttered, and I gave her a warning look which she mostly ignored, and then Amelia burst into the room anyway. "There you all are. No one told me you were here!"

"You've been hiding in your room, Ames" I pointed out.

"Well…_I_ was doing homework…" she started to say, but Felicia interrupted. "_And_ you were emailing Riley to tell him how much you _loooove_ him and _miss_ him and, bleurgh!" Felicia stuck her finger in her mouth and mimed dry-retching just to get her point across.

"Shut up!" Amelia said, and then she looked around the room. "There's nowhere to sit!" she complained.

"There's that chair" Felicia said, pointing to the upright chair no one really liked to sit on.

"Other chair got…burned…" Tray said, pointing in the direction of the window but not taking his eyes off the TV.

Amelia gave Felicia a filthy look, and then turned to Pam. "Budge up, Pam" she said and then she squeezed herself onto the couch next to Pam. That dramatically cut down the room all of us had, this couch wasn't really built for four people, even if one of them was Pam-sized. "I'm squished now" Pam said, and then she turned to me. "Felicia takes all the room in bed too."

"Oh, I do not!" Felicia said. "You get half and you're not really big enough to get half, so you have nothing to complain about."

"I do" Pam muttered, but Felicia chose to ignore that. Amelia smirked, but Felicia ignored that as well, so she gave up and looked around the room before sighing. "Are you just playing with that old thing?" she asked the room at large, pointing vaguely in the direction of the TV the boys were still glued to.

"Yeah…Dad's not that old!" Felicia said, rolling her eyes.

"I didn't mean Dad! Duh!" Amelia said, across Pam who was caught between them.

"I know! Duh yourself!" Felicia retorted.

"Don't be mean to Daddy" Pam said, but she said it kind of quietly, probably wary of stirring them up any further when she couldn't get away in a hurry.

"OK" Sam said, holding out the other controller to Tray. Felicia leaned forward and took it off him, though. "I'll do it" she said.

Sam shrugged. "Alright" he said, way too fucking casually. Yeah, he thought this was his big chance to show his sister up.

And he did win, and Felicia didn't fucking like that at all. "That's a really dumb game" she said. "It's like, there's no skill in it. None at all. And it's really, really old!"

"Everything here is a bit old" Amelia said, looking around the room. "Where'd the curtains go?"

"Blinds" I said. "There were blinds."

"Did they get burned too? Like the chair?" Tray asked, turning around to look at me.

"No" I said. "Your mom cleaned them."

Tray didn't say anything to that piece of information. I guess it wasn't that interesting. Pam though had something to add. "We could see her. Miriam and me. From Miriam's bedroom. She has the coolest bedroom ever. Can I make my room like hers is?"

"We'll see Pam" I said.

"That means no" she said grumpily.

"That means we'll see. Anyway, what does her room have that yours doesn't?" Fuck, I realised I shouldn't have said that as soon as I remembered Sookie mentioning the sewing machine.

However, that wasn't the thing that was uppermost on Pam's mind. "Miriam" she said, kind of haughtily, "Doesn't have to wear boy's clothes because her brother is younger. So that's heaps better. Boys suck."

"Not if you're Amelia" Felicia said, and then she paused and ignored Amelia glaring at her. "Or Mum."

"Mum doesn't like _boys_" Pam said, scathingly.

"She likes me" Sam said. "I got a whole bag of biscuits from her before." And then he realised his mistake and his grin faded pretty fucking quickly.

"Did you?" Felicia asked, sharply. "Where is it then?"

Tray shrugged. "We ate them" he said. Fuck, that wasn't a good thing. I hoped they still ate their dinner. "How long until dinner?" Tray asked, and I figured that answered that question.

"I can't believe you ate all the biscuits!" Felicia complained. "I didn't get any biscuits."

"I got one" Pam said. "But Sam said they didn't have very many, so I could only have one."

Sam did at least have the decency to look a bit sheepish at that comment, but Felicia jumped on it and a fairly large and loud argument broke out over the politics of sharing cookies with your siblings. It got a bit heated, and I was kind of glad none of them seemed to be carrying any weapons. I wasn't too unhappy about it because fuck, they were loud enough to chase most of the thoughts out of my head. It had been a shitty afternoon and I couldn't get rid of the persistent knot in my stomach.

Normally I'd go and talk to Sookie if I felt this shit, but I didn't feel like I could do that at the moment, which was fucking disappointing. I felt like I'd been cast adrift and I wasn't sure I was ever going to get back to shore again.

And then I had to worry about more practical things as Felicia braced herself with one hand on my knee, leaned forward and hit Sam soundly on the shoulder. "Leesh!" I warned, as Sam said "Ow!" and rubbed the spot with his hand.

"Well, he started it by hogging all the biscuits and being greedy!"

"OK, you can go and set the table for dinner" I said to her, and she got up and stomped off to the kitchen, muttering under her breath the whole time.

"She's so rude!" Amelia commented. "I can't believe she acts like that."

"Daddy" Pam said with a big smile. "Do you like this cushion? As a cushion? It kind of has holes in it, look!" She held up the cushion in question.

"Tray, you can't do that!" Sam complained. "That's cheating!"

Maybe I wasn't quite adrift with nothing to anchor me, but maybe I wasn't quite OK either. Although I hadn't run, had I? I hadn't run and I hadn't wanted a drink and I hadn't even thought about burning anything.

So that had to count for something, right? Maybe it hadn't changed after all.

SPOV

After the conversation with Eric I decided there wasn't much more I could do. He'd shut down and wandered off, although I could hear voices coming from the living room so he hadn't gone far, and I had other things I needed to be doing. I decided to just concentrate on dinner, for one thing.

And I needed to, because not only was I trying to remember a recipe I'd seen on TV, I was trying to work with the ingredients I had here, and what Eric had bought. For one thing he'd bought me whole cumin seeds instead of ground, and I had two different types of paprika, but no lemons. I was also, of course, trying to cope with an unfamiliar kitchen which appeared to be the last resting place of a lot of old kitchen utensils, and a very temperamental oven. I really, really missed my oven. Overall though, it wasn't the end of the world, but it required a bit of organisation.

It was nice to be thinking about mundane things again. Tomorrow, I thought, I'd tackle the bathrooms.

After a while Felicia came stomping in and announced she was there to set the table because Sam was greedy and ate all the biscuits. "He did?" I asked.

"Well…him and Tray. And Pam had one. And now _I'm_ the one sent to do this!" She looked at me, clearly expecting my sympathy on that point, but I suspected that there might be more to the story.

It wasn't the first time that day I'd had that thought of course. I still thought there was more to Eric's story about the name, but I doubted I was going to get it out of him anytime soon.

So I watched dinner and helped Felicia figure out how to get everyone seated at the table. It wasn't easy and it had actually been a bit of a bonus for us when Pam had been next door for lunch earlier, because squeezing two outdoor chairs and a bar-stool around the table only meant for four people was a bit of a mission really.

When we were good to go I sent Felicia back into the living room to tell everyone to wash up and I dished up.

"What's this?" Tray asked, once we were all seated, from his perch on one of the barstools. I think he liked sitting up that high. I was on the very uncomfortable folding garden chair, and Felicia had the other one, which she was none too happy about.

"It's, um, Moroccan meatball tagine…sort of…and crunchy potatoes."

"Where are the veges?" Tray asked, suspiciously, poking a meatball with his fork.

"Oh, bugger" I said, realising the beans were still in the microwave, and with much shuffling around of chairs I managed to work my way out of my seat and over to bring them to the table. Tray looked broken-hearted as he realised he just shouldn't have asked the question in the first place.

Eric took a bite and I watched him, partially to gauge his reaction to the food and partially, well, just because I wasn't sure where we went from here. He seemed OK, but who really knew? After all, it wasn't like he wasn't perfectly capable of hiding stuff from me.

OK, well that felt a little mean. And I had been the one who'd insisted it hadn't changed anything. But at the end of the day I wasn't sure who I'd been most trying to convince with that statement.

Eric swallowed, and then turned to me. "Thank you, Sookie" he said. "For the very nice dinner."

The kids all followed suit and thanked me and I figured it was just business as usual then. Maybe nothing had really changed. I didn't know, but now wasn't the time for a lot of soul-searching either. Not when there were seven people seated a table for four and a lot of elbows kept getting in the way. "Ow! Sam!" Felicia said.

"This is freakin' ridiculous" Amelia muttered. "Who has a table this small, anyway?"

After dinner Eric announced he had to go and sort through his Dad's papers, try to find some addresses or phone numbers or something. I left him to that and did dinner clean-up, shower scheduling, brought the blinds back inside and left them on the living room floor while I decided what to do with them. I watched some TV with the kids, broke up a couple of fights, stopped Pam slicing up the cover of one of the cushions, reassured Pam that we would find her some fabric after she stomped off to her room in tears. It was the usual kind of stuff I did in the evenings.

After a while Amelia drifted off to her little room at the back of the house and a while after that I went to find her, curious as to what had been keeping her entertained back there. It quickly became apparent that she'd found a stash of romance novels.

"So, uh, is that one any good?" I asked her, and she gave me a look that suggested she'd rather I hadn't found her reading it, but she was going to brazen it out anyway. "S'alright" she admitted.

"Better than _Twilight_?" I asked, peering at the books lined up there. They'd built up over time, I could judge by the covers. I wondered how many women had contributed to this pile. How many had come here thinking Stan was the romantic hero they'd wished for, and then they'd been discarded like these books? Or had the books been to replace the romance they weren't getting in their day to day lives? Hard to say really.

"Different" Amelia said, her eyes going to back to the book. God, I hoped that didn't mean there was a lot of sex in it.

Or did I? After all, a lot of my sex education had come from romance novels. Was that such a bad thing? Would it stop her asking me a lot of questions?

"What's it about?" I asked.

"Mmm, just this guy…who uh, well he's really a lord, but he's in disguise because his stepfather is out to try to stop him getting his inheritance, and, um, so he turns up at this girl's door. She's the daughter of a gambler fallen on hard times and she's reluctant to take him in, but he has this kind of illness that's really bad and might kill him, so she ends up nursing him back to health, not knowing who the mysterious stranger is. That's all I've read so far. Pretty sure they'll get married though, when he realises he can trust her with his secret identity." She turned back to the book.

"So, uh, did you know we had a mysterious stranger turn up on our doorstep?" I said.

"Who?" Amelia asked sharply.

"Eric" I said. "Did you know that he used to have a different last name? When he was a kid?" I wasn't sure why I was telling Amelia this, other than to check what someone else's reaction was.

Amelia shrugged. "So?" she said. "So did Felicia. It's not like he's, you know, a lord with a title or anything, or he has a secret fortune. I mean, this place is kind of crappy." She waved a hand around dismissively.

"Um. OK" I said. I couldn't argue with her about the house, but I did get the feeling it had been nice once upon a time.

"And, you know they're supposed to be tall, dark and handsome, right?" Amelia said, pointing to the image on the cover. I was about to tell her I'd got it two-thirds correct when she said "And one out of three because you happened to find a freak of nature isn't that great Mum."

I'd figure I'd leave it there before poor Eric got even more denigrated by his daughter. And she was his daughter, after all. Everyone thought that way about their own dad. Growing up I didn't even find blond guys all that attractive much because there were too many of them in my family.

I wasn't going to tell Eric that though. Guess we all had our secrets still. And I was OK with that.

Maybe I'd been right and nothing had changed?

I was usually right about that kind of stuff. Wasn't I?

"I might have a look through the pile" I said, nodding at the books. "Find something to read myself."

"Whatever, Mum" Amelia said dismissively. "But only from those ones, because they're the ones I've already read."

EPOV

I walked into the room that I'd always think of as Dad's and opened up the closet and pulled out all the piles of paper and shit that was stashed in there. Fuck, he'd kept a big pile of crap.

It took me a while to look through it all. Most of it was no fucking use to me. Just a bunch of old bank statements and tax returns and bills and all the other shit you collect over time. Was this all Dad was reduced to?

Eventually I found some letters, Christmas cards, things that gave me a few names of the rest of his family. I switched on his computer on the desk in the corner and realised I didn't have a fucking clue what the password would be. Would my kids be able to guess my password? Probably. But Dad was a fucking mystery to me in life and he wasn't much better in death. So I gave up on that idea.

I called the numbers I'd managed to unearth. I had a very short conversation with one cousin, left a message with another, spoke to someone who might have been an aunt, but I suspected she didn't know what day it was, let alone who the fuck I was trying to tell her about. She'd probably had a few conversations like this in her life. The final number was for Dad's sister, the one he never spoke to. She sounded mildly interested, wanted to know the name of the funeral home so she could send some flowers, and then she hung up.

Fuck, not even his own sister really gave a shit.

I wasn't sure what to do with all the stuff I'd pulled out of the closet. I thought about just pushing it all back in there, but figured at some point it should go in the trash, so I put it all in a corner of the bedroom instead. And then I had one last look around in the closet for anything else that might be in there. There were some more boxes right in the back corner, so I reached for those. More bank statements, more tax returns, things like my parent's wedding certificate. I looked at that more closely. Yep, as I suspected, that was dated a whole six months before I was born. Fuck.

There was a blouse that some chick had left here at some point, and a small box that contained a bunch of the photos which showed my mother. Huh. He'd kept them. Maybe he thought she was coming back for them. Like he thought she was coming back for me.

I wondered what he would have done if he hadn't thought that. Would he have kept me around? Would he have dumped me somewhere else? How fucking thrilled would that sister in Texas have been to have me dropped on her doorstep?

I shuffled through the photos, I hadn't seen them in a long time, perhaps ever but they didn't mean a lot to me. Didn't really jog any memories, although I could remember when some of them were taken.

And then I flicked past one that caught my eye. Fuck. There she was, wearing that shirt. The one I'd just pulled out of the closet.

He'd kept it. He'd kept her blouse for all those years. Did he think she was coming back for that too, or had it just reminded him of her?

I didn't know, and I'd never be able to ask him now. That thought made me a little sad, even though I knew deep down he'd fucking avoid answering any of my questions and try to just turn it around to show what a fucking pussy I was.

He'd tried that in the hospital, and I'd tried to just keep us away from discussing Sookie as much as possible. The kids were one thing, but Sookie, fuck; I just needed him to stay off that topic. But of course he couldn't

"So…the older ones? The ones that aren't fucking yours? The ones she captured you for, they call you dad still?" he asked one particularly fucking long night.

"Yeah" I said. "They do."

"Huh. Fuck. You wouldn't call anyone else mom."

"No one was here fucking long enough" I pointed out. Also, they were shitty fucking whores, but I didn't say that, wary of getting him too riled up. I might have hated him at that point, but I didn't want to be sitting there getting fucking yelled at when he finally dropped dead. Better I wasn't considered responsible for his final demise, I figured. I had enough to shit to deal with already.

"They're all bitches" he said. I realised I maybe didn't need to tell him what shitty choices they were. Although fuck, he'd kept making them. What was that definition of insanity again?

"And yet you kept trying to fucking replace her" I said quietly. Fuck it; let him deal with what he'd done.

He'd turned his head and looked at me for a long, hard minute and then he just said. "So? Whose fucking replacement are you? The dead husband's? How long did it take her to find some sucker who'd help her out?"

"Fuck off" I said, probably with a lot less anger than I felt. I knew I wasn't. Sookie had said I wasn't. It wasn't like that with us. But what the fuck did my dad know about anything? "She loves me" I said in the end. "Sookie loves me."

"Yeah?" he said, like he didn't fucking believe me. "Well aren't you the lucky one, Eric."

"Yep" I agreed. "I really fucking am." And then we sat there in one of the painful silences that had filled the time I'd spent with him in hospital since the start. I think we sat there for a very long time, until I figured I'd had enough for the day and went home.

But this, this fucking blouse. He'd kept it? Maybe he really did love her, maybe he really did want her back, and maybe he liked the reminder? I'd never know and a part of me was fucking annoyed that I'd never know. I'd never really know anything about their relationship, about why it all happened, about why I just got fucking discarded in the aftermath? Fuck.

What did it really matter anyway?

I was still sitting on the floor looking at that blouse when Sookie crept into the room holding two cups. "I braved the coffeemaker" she said, as she put them down on the bureau. "How's it going?"

"S'OK" I said, shrugging. "I found the numbers I needed. Can't work out his password for his email though. And I found this." I held up the blouse.

Sookie wrinkled her nose. "Oooh, pussy-bows at the neck. Yeah, haven't seen those for a while. Most other stuff has come back into fashion, but that one so far we've missed out on again. So did someone leave it here?"

"Yeah" I said. "She did. It was my mother's."

"Oh" Sookie said, and then she sat on the bed next to me. "That's…I don't know what that is. I guess you have to tell me."

I sighed. "It's one more shitty thing I don't understand, something else that reminds me just how fucked up it all was around here, and just, fuck, it's nice and it's awful all at once." I rubbed my face. I felt so fucking tired.

"Yeah" Sookie said, and then she shuffled sideways on the bed so she was even closer to me. I put my head on her lap and she ran her hand through my hair. That felt nice. "It's a pretty awful thing to have to do, going through all this stuff. The worst bit, I thought, was that it…well it forces you to really see your parents as people for the first time, and it's too late then. You spend years and years thinking they're just mum or just dad and then they're gone and you're left with all the reminders of the life they led and you have so many questions, but no one's ever going to answer them. I wish I'd asked my parents lots of things, but I didn't know I'd only have them for twenty years."

"Mmm" I said. "That's what I meant, but my brain isn't working as well as yours as the moment."

Sookie laughed. "I'm kinda surprised" she said. "I've been watching god-awful reality TV with the kids. Well, it was on in the background while they all bickered about what they were watching anyway."

"Was it a cooking show?" I asked.

"No, and even if it had been, I wouldn't understand half the ingredients anyway. What the hell is a stick of butter? I've been wondering since I used to watch _Sesame Street_ as a kid."

I laughed, and Sookie kept stroking my head. Maybe we were OK? If she was making jokes we were OK, weren't we?

"You know" she said. "When my parents died I just remember how grateful I was to have Bill. He was really good then. I kept thinking he'd get tired of me being all weepy and morose, but he didn't. He used to just sit and keep me company. It was nice. He was good at that sort of thing, and I envied him that. He could just…I don't know. He could be really quiet at times, but it wasn't a bad quiet. It was a nice quiet. Of course sometimes he'd just retreat into himself and shut me out and that was kind of horrible. In hindsight, maybe. At the time I was kind of impressed that he didn't feel the need to in my face all the time."

She paused and I wasn't quite sure where this was going. "OK" I said.

"But overall, I was grateful for Bill. I was grateful for Bill for a lot of things over a lot of years." I waited but she didn't say anything else, so I sat up to look at her face. She shrugged. "And that's just the way it was. So…do you feel any differently?"

"About…what?" I asked. I thought that maybe it had been a story designed to make me feel better about dealing with my Dad's shit, but if it had, it had maybe missed the mark. I think the scalp rub had been working better, and I was tempted to go back to that.

"About me" Sookie said quietly.

"Why would I?" I asked,

"Well…that, that story. I mean it's part of my past and while you maybe knew the general outline, you didn't know all the details. I had a relationship with someone before I met you. For about fifteen years. It's a long time and a lot of stuff happened and it wasn't all bad and while it isn't exactly secret it's also not something I ever felt the need to tell you because it just doesn't have anything to do with you and me. And I'm OK with that, if you're OK with that."

"So…this is about the name?" I asked.

"Uh-huh. Well, as Amelia pointed out, Felicia used to have a different name too, and I don't love her any the less. Despite the fact she likes to pick fights and could do with being a bit calmer and controlled at times."

"She does like to block us all out when she's had enough, and just pretend we don't exist" I pointed out.

"Yeah…well, hopefully she gets better with age. Although I'm still waiting to see if that adage works with Amelia. Anyway, the point is that there's a whole heap of stuff floating around in our pasts, and, while I maybe wish you'd told me that one, I can understand why you didn't, that it had nothing to do with me and you were who you were long before I showed up."

"I wish I had too" I said. I did, now. Really, what the fuck would it have mattered? But I was always so scared that if Sookie knew the truth about me she'd run for the fucking hills. The fact she never had said a fuckload about Sookie really.

"And who knows? If I'd listened to Bill when he did decide to lecture me about stuff, I might have changed my name before I met you anyway." She sighed and rolled her eyes. "That one really pissed him off, and I bet that Lorena wasn't above needling him about it either."

"We all come with baggage" I said.

"Yep, and Lorena was a big part of Bill's."

"I thought" I said, looking around the piles of my dad's stuff. "I thought I could lose mine. I thought I could get rid of it by getting rid of the name. If I didn't have the same name as him then it didn't matter what he did, what people knew about him, it was nothing to do with me. But it didn't fucking work. Fuck, when I was a kid I just wanted it to be so fucking different. I wanted…well, I don't fucking know what I wanted. Something. Anything." I'd just wanted to be out of here, but where I didn't know. I just knew that there had to be something better than this half-life dad lived. It just took me a while to fucking figure out what that was. It took Sookie, really, to show me what it was.

Sookie looked thoughtful. "Did you get it?" she asked.

"Get what?"

"What it is that you didn't know you wanted" she said slowly, frowning slightly as she pieced the sentence together. "Did you get that? In the end?" She looked at me expectantly.

"Yeah" I said, reaching out and taking the hand she had placed in her lap. "I fucking did."

"Then I definitely don't pity you then" Sookie said, smiling. "You lucked out. Big-time"

"I really did" I agreed. "I really fucking did."

Pam wandered into the bedroom looking sleepy and rumpled. "Felicia's pushing me out" she said. "And I haven't got any fabric."

I looked at the blouse that had once belonged to another Pamela. "Here" I said, handing it to her. "You can have this."

She looked more awake at that. "Really?" she asked. "But it's so pretty." She looked up at me. "And it's OK to cut it up?"

"Yeah" I said. "It probably needs to be reused."

"Cool" Pam said. "So that's vintage, right Mum? Like you said I could have?"

"Yeah, it is" Sookie said, looking at me and smiling. "But you'd better get back to bed now."

Pam sighed. "Because we're doing something in the morning. It's not cowboys, is it Daddy? Sam thinks it's cowboys, because there are cowboys here in the States, but I don't like cows…or boys. So let's not do cowboy stuff. Let's do something else!"

"OK, Pam" I said. "We can do something else." And then I led her out of the room to go and see if we could fit her back into bed with Felicia. I wasn't overly hopeful about that manoeuvre. The rest though, the rest should be OK.

SPOV

I felt a lot better after I'd talked to Eric. It was OK after all. "Did you fit her back in?" I asked him, when he came back to the bedroom and drained his coffee in one mouthful. Then he pulled a face.

"Not good? I guess it's gone a bit cold now."

"Mmm" Eric said. "I think maybe Amelia and Felicia's effort was better. Still, at least you didn't try to poison me with fucking instant."

"Oh shut up" I said, and I threw a pillow at him, before going into the ensuite to get ready for bed. When I came out Eric took his turn and then we arranged ourselves in bed so Eric had his head on my chest. I guess he just needed a bit of comforting. And that was perfectly fine with me.

"I'm glad you came" Eric said. "It's better with you all here."

"Really? Even with the arguments, fighting, and bitching?" I asked. "Wow, you really did miss us." Eric chuckled at that.

"I'm very lucky" he said. "I've been lucky since the day I met you, Sookie. And I'm going to take your silence to mean your lip is now wobbling and you can't talk."

"No" I lied. "I'm fine."

"Of course you are" Eric agreed. "And I love you very much."

"I love you too. I will always love you, Eric" I said, working very hard to keep my voice steady. So hard I hadn't realised what I said, until there was a pause and Eric said "If you break into that song I might be forced to smother you, Sookie. Seriously, the neighbours are already fucking pissed about the chair, I don't need to give them another reason to drive us out of the neighbourhood."

"Shut up, Eric" I said, as he chuckled to himself.

It was nice though, in a way. We were still us. And that was all that mattered, really.

**Thanks for reading!**


	31. Chapter 31

**A/N for some reason this took ages and I don't really know why. So I'm going to blame the toddler because you know, she's two, what's she going to do? Mmm, probably insist on ice cream as payment.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

We might have relocated to a different house in a different country, but getting the kids ready was the same old grind wherever you were. Possibly it didn't help that Eric was being a bit cagey about where we were going, but Tray wasn't exactly doing me any favours either. "Tray, did you get dressed yet?" I asked him.

"Yeah" he said, not looking at me. I'd lost sight of him for a while and he'd drifted back to the PlayStation again. However, I wasn't the only thing Tray hadn't been paying attention to.

"Tray, take your clothes off, take your pyjamas off, and then try getting dressed again, OK?" I suggested. There'd been a step missed somewhere along the way in his getting dressed process.

"OK" Tray said, looking down at himself as though he was surprised he'd somehow managed to just jam clothes over pyjamas. Sadly, I wasn't. It wasn't the first time this had happened.

Eric was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and seemingly unconcerned that the kids were all wandering around in various states of readiness. "So…there's a plan, right? For today?" I asked him.

"Mmm" he said, staring at the bottom of his cup like it might reveal the plan. "We should get more coffee" he said. "This stuff is pretty shit."

"OK" I said slowly, thinking that didn't really answer my question. Tray ran through the kitchen and outside and was pretty sure he'd corrected the pyjama problem. So that was one down, although I would now have to round him up from the back garden and find the pyjamas he'd dumped somewhere so I could wash them.

I wondered if Sam was ready yet and I looked out the window to see if he was out there with Tray. He was, but he wasn't alone.

"There's an extra kid in the back yard" I said to Eric.

"Uh-huh" Eric said, sounding totally unconcerned. I guess it had happened before, quite regularly when we'd lived next door to Andy and Halleigh. I wondered if it would have made any difference to Amelia and Riley's relationship if they'd spent all their lives living next to each other at this point, and whether it would have made the whole idea of going out more or less appealing. I thought that maybe Amelia might have been a bit dismissive of Riley if she'd been seeing him every day and watching her little brothers follow him around. Although…if she had gone the other way it might have been hard to get rid of Riley if he only had to jump the fence to get to her, and her old bedroom had been on that side of the house.

"It was probably a good thing we moved when we did" I mused, filling up water bottles to take with us in the car.

"There's a whole train of thought behind that statement that I missed out on, isn't there Sookie?" Eric asked.

"Yeah" I admitted. "But you know what I meant."

"The scary thing is, I do" Eric said, and he gave me a big grin. I figured that meant he was feeling as relieved as I was that despite everything that had happened the day before, life went on as normal. I had meant it when I'd said it didn't change anything, and this was our chance to prove it to each other. So far, we were doing OK, although Eric now seemed unusually interested in the bottles lined up on the kitchen bench.

"So, whose is which bottle?" he asked. It seemed a weird thing for him to suddenly care about, but then I realised it was a ploy to keep me from asking again about the plan for the day. Still, it wouldn't hurt him to know before the arguments broke out.

"OK, so Amelia's the purple, Felicia's green, Sam's blue, Tray's orange and Pam's is pink. Simple."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, frowning. "There used to be a…yellow one? Who did that belong to?"

"Um…I think that was Tray's? That got left at soccer and never seen again."

"And Sam had the red one?"

"No, you had the red one. Don't ask me where that went either. Felicia, why aren't you dressed yet?"

She sighed dramatically. "I can't even get into the bedroom. Pam's taken over the whole freakin' floor space and it's hopeless. Just hopeless."

"What's she doing?" Eric asked.

"Playing" Felicia said, looking out the window at her brothers. "Who's that kid?"

"Don't know. Might be Miriam's brother" I said. Whoever he was he seemed to be happy following along with Sam's instructions so it didn't look like Sam and Tray were about to send him home anytime soon. That might prove a problem when it was time to leave.

But of course we were only leaving if everyone could get dressed. "OK, I'll go and deal with Pam, you get the boys to come inside" I said to Eric, and I walked off down to the bedroom Felicia and Pam were sharing. Sure enough the floor and the bed was covered in some kind of shanty town being inhabited by all the My Little Ponies and Littlest Pet Shop creatures Pam had brought with her from home.

"Pam, there's a…how is anyone supposed to get in here?" I asked. "You'll have to clean this all up."

"But I just set it all out! And I haven't played with it yet! And you wouldn't let me go next door, so I need something to do" she complained.

"Well, that's not really the point. The point is that Felicia needs to get in here…" I trailed off as I noticed something. "Where'd that come from?" I asked, pointing to the figurine of Xena, Warrior Princess who appeared to be ruling over all the small plastic animals and ponies.

"Sam and Tray didn't want her" Pam said. "And I thought she was nice. Look, she has sword, and a shield and everything!"

"Uh-huh" I said. I guess she'd been in the big bag of stuff Sam and Tray had been going through instead of actually going to sleep the night before. From what I could work out they were divvying up _Star Wars_ figurines and Transformers and goodness knows what else they had in there and when questioned, said it was totally OK with Eric. He had been busy going through his Dad's stuff at that point in time so I hadn't gone to check with him, I'd just told them to go to sleep and leave it to the morning.

It suddenly struck me as kind of odd that they'd all been engaged in exactly the same task, going through their father's belongings. It's just that Tray and Sam still had their dad around to ask about stuff, although mostly they'd just been rifling through the toys and assuming it was all theirs now.

Still, if they weren't going to ask any questions, then maybe I would.

"Let Felicia in here, please Pam" I said. "She needs to get dressed."

"She wants to wear her pjs!" Pam insisted. "She said so."

"Yeah, but she doesn't get a choice on that one. So let her get to her suitcase."

"Can I pick her clothes for her and just give them to her?" Pam asked, looking hopeful. I didn't like her chances of trying to play stylist to Felicia.

"You can maybe suggest it. But if she says no, let her get dressed, understand?"

"Yeah" Pam said, quietly, and she started moving some of the toys off the floor, with my help. When we'd managed to clear a path Felicia arrived in the doorway. "S'OK" she said. "I got something. From the clean washing."

"OK" I said, as I turned around and saw what she'd found. The cropped track pants she was wearing were fine, if a little crumpled, but the t-shirt…well, it was the t-shirt from the recesses of Eric's old wardrobe. The one I'd wanted to use as a duster which I'd washed because, well, who wants a musty-smelling duster?

I hadn't intended it to be worn as actual clothing again, and thought I was safe because it wouldn't fit Eric. Bugger. "Dad said good thinking" Felicia announced.

"Yeah, good job Felicia" I said. "Now, both of you get some shoes on." I left the room with my prize, and went to knock on Amelia's bedroom door. "We're leaving in a minute!" There was a noise from Amelia that I hoped meant she was putting the book away and putting her shoes on, and then I went back to the kitchen, to see how Eric was getting on.

Short answer was, he wasn't.

"That bottle's, uh, a lot fancier…" he said, pointing at my water bottle.

"Yeah, that's because I don't lose mine. It goes to work and comes home with me."

Eric picked it up and examined it. "It's aluminium" he said.

"No, I think you'll find it has more syllables than that, Eric. It's actually al-u-min-ee-um, not a-loo-min-um." Eric gave me a look that suggested what it actually was was unfair because I clearly had a water bottle and he did not. "You can share it though" I said, "Even if you can't pronounce it."

"Gosh, thank you Sookie" Eric said, kind of sarcastically. "Your generosity knows no bounds, does it?"

"Hey, I'm not the one who puts stuff down and leaves it at the park. Now, speaking of things being left behind, get the boys." And then I remembered what I had. "Oh, but I found your secret, by the way" I said, holding up the figurine.

"What?" Eric asked. "Oh…was that in the stuff the boys had?"

"Yep, who knew you liked Xena?"

Eric shrugged. "I don't know where that came from."

"Of course you don't" I teased.

Eric looked a bit miffed. "I was probably given it" he said. "As a present."

"Yeah, yeah, but you never watched the show?"

"I might have" he said. "It was kind of shit, really. But the outfits were good." He grinned at me. "All that leather and stuff."

"Uh-huh. Yeah, that's the look we all aspire to."

"Well, I think it would suit you" Eric said.

"I still think it's weird you like Xena" I mused.

"Exotic women in leather, Sookie. What's not to like?"

"Um…it's Lucy Lawless, Eric. She grew up in Mt Albert. That's not exotic, that's five minutes down the road."

"Not from here" Eric said. "Maybe I just really like New Zealand women?"

"Uh-huh, and maybe you thought she was Australian or possibly didn't even care?"

"Might have been that too" Eric conceded. "I'll go and tell the boys their friend's going home and we're leaving now."

"Good plan" I agreed.

We managed to get everyone to the front of the house, plus all the snacks and the water bottles that I'd packed for the trip…wherever we were going that was. "So, do we need jackets?" I asked Eric.

Eric looked perplexed at that. "OK" I said. "Everyone in the van, then."

The kids started to climb into the van I'd rented, with the requisite amount of pushing and shoving and arguing over who sat where, and Eric looked at me. "Yeah…" he said, slowly. "I guess we will have to take that, um…vehicle…"

"Dad, can we go in the Corvette, instead?" Tray asked.

"Well…not everyone can fit in the Corvette" Eric pointed out.

"That's OK" Tray said, cheerfully. "I don't mind if it's just us."

"No, Tray" Eric said, and Tray climbed into the van and didn't even seem to have the heart to push Pam out of her seat. Eric turned to me. "Keys" he said, somewhat imperiously. Sadly, he was out of luck.

"No" I said. "You can't drive." Eric frowned like I was talking gibberish, which was unlikely. For one thing I pronounced all the syllables in aluminium. "You weren't there, when I hired it. So they haven't seen your licence, you're not listed on the agreement with the rental company. And the insurance."

Eric looked kind of thoughtful at that. He looked kind of thoughtful for a while, like he was trying to figure out a way around it. Short of me driving us to the nearest branch of the same hire car company and getting Eric added on to the agreement, there wasn't a way around.

Eric seemed to eventually come to the same conclusion. "OK then" he said. "I'll give you directions."

I climbed into the driver's seat and checked I could see to reverse out of the driveway. "Sit down, Tray" I warned. "I can't see through your head."

"And put your seatbelt on" Eric said sharply. I tried not to take that as a personal endorsement that Eric thought I might get into an accident and endanger us all before we'd even left the driveway, but just as Eric making sure the kids were all safely strapped in as per usual.

"Just stay on the right" Eric said, as I started the engine.

"I'm fine" I said, through slightly gritted teeth. I hoped we weren't going too far.

"Right, Sookie!" Eric said, as I straightened up the van on the street.

"I know! And you can stop clutching at the dashboard like that, you're making it worse."

"Is Mum OK driving?" Amelia asked from the back.

"Yes" Eric and I said together, both sounding just as tense as the other. I drove us to the end of the street and then I put the windscreen wipers on.

"I don't think she is" Amelia muttered.

EPOV

I had a plan, but the plan had involved me actually fucking driving us all to Sacramento. Sookie driving was just…well, I didn't want to say nerve-wracking. But it kind of fucking was.

I worried that she'd drift to the left, I worried that she'd confuse the other drivers on the road by continually putting the windscreen wipers on and forgetting to signal her turns. I worried like fuck when she encountered a four-way stop sign and not a roundabout, and kind of hesitated about which car went first. I really fucking wished she would keep her eyes on the road and not keep glancing at me and saying "You don't have to hold on quite that tightly, Eric".

"I just…right, Sookie. On the right."

"Yes, I know! I'm on the right. See? This is the right."

"It's the part of the right that is really close to the fucking middle of the road. So close to the middle it's almost left."

"Oh, for God's sake, Eric. You're not a very supportive passenger, you know that?"

"Sookie, if we die in a fiery car-crash, I don't think anyone is going to care that I wasn't supportive. That car goes first."

"Yes! I know!"

We were almost there before I realised how quiet the kids in the back seats were being. No one had even asked if we were almost there yet. I figured that maybe they were a bit worried about Sookie's driving as well.

"We're nearly there" I said to everyone, trying to sound cheerful and not worried.

"Yay" Amelia said, almost completely deadpan. Yeah, they were a bit worried about the driving. "Right!" I said, as I turned back to watch Sookie negotiate a corner and start to drift left.

"Oh, for fuck's sake" Felicia muttered.

SPOV

No thanks to the world's largest and most annoying passenger, we finally made it to our destination. I don't think it's what the kids expected.

"Where are we?" Tray asked.

"Parking lot, Tray" Eric said to him.

"No, but…what's here? It's just like, streets and stuff" he said.

"Is it Disneyland?" Pam asked.

"No, Pam" Amelia said. "Disneyland was much better." Poor Pam, her face just fell through the floor. All she needed was a reminder of the stuff she'd missed out on.

"So what's here?" Felicia asked.

"You'll see" Eric said, enigmatically.

"Mum?" Sam asked. "Do you know?"

"No" I said, as I unloaded stuff from the car and tried not to add up all the discarded rubbish from the snacks that had been eaten on the way here. How much had they all eaten?

"I hope it's good" Pam grumbled. "Miriam was sad I couldn't go to see her today."

Eric sighed. "Well let's just have a look around, OK?" he said. The kids grudgingly agreed, and we set off.

"So why here?" I asked, as we walked down one of the streets.

Eric shrugged. "Dunno…I just like Sacramento. And, I thought well…" He seemed to be thinking of something.

"You went to college here, right?" I prompted, and he nodded. "So it's where it happened" he said. "It's where I changed it. My name."

"Oh" I said. I guess this was Eric's way of; well I wasn't sure, showing me? Involving me? Whatever it was, it was kind of sweet. I reached over and took his hand.

"Oh, euw! You guys are worse than Amelia and Riley" Felicia said dismissively.

"Shut up, Leesha!" Amelia said. "Just because no one wants to ask you out!"

"Mum! Tray went that way!" Pam yelled.

"Well, in my head it was going to be a nice day out" Eric said, turning around to see where Tray had gone and kind of yanking me around in the process.

It was, though, once the kids settled down. We walked through the Old Town which Sam was thrilled by, although he kind of wished there'd been real cowboys. We looked in some of the shops and Eric had to resist Pam's continued requests to buy her one of those terribly expensive Russian doll sets. We ate Subway and looked at the river and the big river boats going up and down.

The best thing, surprisingly, was the railway museum. Amelia had been horrified when Eric had suggested it, and I had to admit even I'd been prepared to file it under 'things you do for the kids', but it was really entertaining and by the end of it I didn't even mind the fact that Eric bought the boys big wooden whistles that imitated train whistles. Loudly.

By mid-afternoon the kids were starting to get a bit tired, so we headed back to where we'd parked the car and Eric didn't even grumble about the fact I had to drive. I guess he was in a good mood too.

Pam fell asleep in the car on the way home, which given the amount of noise the boys were making with their whistles, was quite a feat on her part. Felicia threatened to throw the whistles out the window, but sadly those kinds of threats only really carried any weight if they came from Eric, and he still seemed to be in feeling OK. He only told me to keep to the right a few times and even let me negotiate the odd stop sign by myself.

By the time we were nearly home though, I realised that as nice as the day had been I'd not only missed out on a day's cleaning, but I hadn't really organised anything for dinner either. We'd pretty much eaten our way through the groceries Eric had bought the previous day and I wasn't sure if I could face going to the supermarket right then.

"We should stop for dinner" I suggested to Eric.

"Mmm" he agreed, as he took a sip from my water bottle. "We could…" he was about to suggest something when I spotted a restaurant, or possibly a diner. Well, that'd do.

"That'll do" I said, as I indicated to turn into the car park, happy that I was now putting the indicator on first-time and not the windscreen wipers.

"Um…I don't know if that place is that good…" Eric said.

"I just need cheap and fast before anyone melts down. The snacks ran out a while back" I pointed out as I turned into the carpark and remembered to stay on the right. It was one thing on the roads when I was hemmed in by lane-markings and following other cars, but in a car park I just wanted to drive on the left no matter what side of the car I was sitting on. The weird thing was that Eric didn't even say anything when I had to move the car over to the right a bit. He was just staring at the door of the restaurant with a sort of horrified expression.

"We could just, uh, have something at home?" he suggested.

"Well, we could" I agreed. "So tell me what you're cooking." I found a parking spot and, with a bit of manoeuvring, managed to get the van into it.

"Wake up Pam!" Felicia said. "We're getting fed!"

"Yay! I'm starv…really, really hungry!" Sam said.

We unloaded everyone and trooped inside, and I tried to ignore the way Eric was scanning around over the heads of everyone. "I think we could go somewhere nicer" he said, as Tray watched a waitress bring out a hamburger that was the size of someone's head. "I want that!" he said pointing, and kind of drawing attention to us.

"I'm not really dressed for nicer" I pointed out. I looked down at my top again. It was one of those ones which I always like in theory, it was brown with a blue hibiscus print on it, a gathered scoop neckline and a tie at the front which left a small cut-out to show a bit cleavage, but every time I wore it I worried that it just made me look too busty. I kept thinking about giving it to Amelia, but Eric always said I looked nice in it, so I left it, only to have the same thought the next time I wore it.

"You're fine" Eric said, giving me a quick glance. And then the hostess turned up to seat us and I followed her to the table she indicated and hoped that Eric was following me.

EPOV

The day in Sacramento had been fun, in the end. At least I'd got to show the kids something while we were here, even if there'd been some grumbling about the museum from Amelia. And it had been a distraction from what we'd have to do the next day. The funeral. Fuck, there was no getting around that.

But I had hoped that we didn't have to fucking eat here. It wasn't that I thought it would be awkward…well, fuck. No, it would be awkward. Maybe Melanie only worked Sundays.

We sat down and Tray talked excitedly about the size of the hamburger he was going to order, and Amelia complained that there weren't any main meals listed on the menu, until Felicia pointed out that the entrees were the mains and the appetisers were the entrees and it was all different here and if she wasn't so obsessed with Riley she might remember a few of these things. I just looked around to see if I could see Melanie. I wasn't sure what I could do if she was here, of course. It would be kind of obvious if I stood up and then the fire alarm started, but it would be nice to be prepared.

"Are you sure you're OK?" Sookie asked me, and I looked over at her. She was wearing that shirt with the blue and brown pattern that made her boobs look massive. I liked that shirt.

"Yep" I said, doing one last check of the room. No Melanie. Fuck, I think we were clear.

"Well, now that you've finished scoping out all the exits, perhaps you'd like to explain to Tray that free soda refills does not mean drink as much as you can as quickly as you can."

We made it almost all the way through dinner; it was so fucking close it wasn't funny. But just as we were finishing up dessert, Sam having insisted that he needed to make sure that American ice cream was just like the stuff at home and not taking my word for it that ice cream was ice cream, I saw Melanie walk in from the back, tying an apron around her waist and then go and talk to another waitress. Our waitress. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

"OK, eat up" I said. "We need to get going."

"I did eat up!" Tray complained. "I've got no more ice cream." He looked at Pam. "Daddy!" Pam complained. "Tray's looking at me. He can't have my ice cream!"

"Eat faster Pam, and it won't be a problem" I told her.

Thankfully our original waitress brought the bill over and left it next to me. I pulled out my wallet and Sookie looked over me. "Don't tip her too much" she hissed. "She wasn't that good."

"Sookie, it's not that poor woman's fault that she can't translate tomato sauce, or understand five kids talking all at once when they have accents."

"What accent?" Sookie asked. I think she was joking. Fuck, I hoped she was joking. They all kind of stood out around here; it wasn't like there were a lot of other New Zealanders wandering around. I hoped they now all understood what it was like to be me.

I left the cash and tried to shepherd everyone out to the parking lot before Melanie came over. Although she might not. Maybe now she'd seen me the once she was done with me. I could kind of fucking understand that.

"I'm just going to the ladies" Sookie said, walking back into the diner. "I'll be back in a minute. Just hang on here."

"Um…really?" I asked, but she was gone, and I was left with five kids in the entranceway of the diner. Except that soon it was four kids.

"Tray's not here" Felicia pointed out.

"What?" I asked, looking around.

"Tray went…somewhere" she said, wrinkling her nose.

"Sam, do you know where Tray is?" I asked.

"Um…no" he said, and I looked out into the parking lot to see if he was out there looking at cars again. And then I heard Melanie's voice behind me. "There you go, honey" she said. "There's your dad."

"Oh, um…thanks" I said, turning around to look at Melanie who was beaming at Tray. "You weren't at the table" he grumbled.

"The trick is to not fu…walk off" I said to him. "Just stay with everyone."

"Or don't" Felicia said shrugging. I frowned at her, but she ignored me.

"I knew exactly whose kid he was the moment I saw him!" Melanie said brightly. "And he has the cutest Australian accent."

"What?" Tray asked, kind of rudely.

"Say, thank you Tray" I reminded him. "For helping you out."

"I wasn't lost!" he protested. "You guys were all lost."

"I'm not lost" Pam said. Amelia didn't even look up from her phone to see what was going on.

I hoped Melanie might leave and go back to her work, but she didn't. "Wow" she said. "You really do have five kids, Eric. That's just…wow! Kind of funny actually." I was about to reply to that when I realised that part of the reason she was smiling was that Sam and Tray were busy punching each other in the arm and Sam had shoved Tray into Felicia who'd doled out more punishment to poor Tray. Yeah, I'm sure it was really fucking amusing if you weren't in charge of them all.

"OK, so we better get going now guys" I said, opening the door and pushing Sam out.

"What about Mum?" he asked.

"She'll find us" I assured him.

"But…" he started to say. "Out!" I tried, shoving Tray out as well.

"Bye Eric" Melanie said, still trying not to laugh. "You have fun with those kids."

"I'm not a kid" Amelia said, suddenly tuning into the conversation. "I don't act like that!"

Felicia rolled her eyes dramatically, and Pam turned to Melanie and said "My new friend Miriam has a sewing machine!"

"That's great, honey. You have fun with your daddy."

"Oh, he doesn't sew" Pam said. "And he gets grumpy when I get too much glitter on him when we do craft. That's OK though."

Melanie gave up most of her pretence of not laughing and started giggling. I didn't see that it was really that fucking funny. She should try being in charge of them sometimes. It was like a fucking circus, it really was. I was just glad that we hadn't left anyone in Sacramento.

Eventually we got out into the parking lot and over to where the car was parked, which is when I realised that, of course, Sookie had the keys. Fuck.

"Hey, look!" Tray yelled, from somewhere I couldn't fucking see. "It's a Ferrari!"

SPOV

When I came out of the ladies' there was no sign of the rest of the family which was odd because I had the keys to the car and trying to keep five kids within your sight line in a car park was fraught with danger. There was always the possibility of someone getting squished.

So I was kind of focussed on getting out to where they all were and not so much on the voice behind me that kept saying "Mrs Davis! Mrs Davis!" After all, it was a name that didn't have anything to do with me. I'd answer to Northman, but not that.

It was only when she tapped me on the shoulder as I reached the door that I realised who she meant, and I felt a bit odd. I wasn't sure what to do. I mean, if this person didn't know Eric had changed his name were we telling her? Were we not telling her? And how did she know Eric anyway?

I turned around and realised it was one of the waitresses. One I hadn't seen before. Was that who Eric had been looking for when we arrived? I suddenly realised that I might have told Eric that I'd wished he spilled the beans about the name, but I didn't want every single thing from his past rearing it's, well not ugly, actually kind of pretty, head when I was around. I'd had it pretty good for the last ten years, never having to deal with this sort of thing, and now I realised it kind of sucked.

"Um…yes?" I said, hoping that maybe it was just I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe. I looked down. No such luck.

"I, um…well, I went to school with Eric…" I tried not to think of what that might be a euphemism for. "And, well…just…you have a lovely family. I saw them. With Eric. That was kind of…um, eye-opening. So anyway, just that it's nice to see you all here and good luck."

"OK" I said, hoping the kids had all been well-behaved when she saw them.

"It's not what I would have expected" she said, as we both turned to watch Tray run past the window. Oh, I hoped no cars came along and ran him over. Eric's voice drifted through the glass as he yelled "Get back here now, Tray!" I wanted to ask this woman if he'd always been that loud, but maybe it wasn't a good idea.

"To be honest" I said, "Not much of my life is what I expected it to be, but I wouldn't have it any other way." I didn't know why I decided to confide in her, but she seemed fairly harmless. And I was unlikely to see her again after all.

"You're lucky then" she said. "I wasn't sure whether I should congratulate you or wish you luck when I saw you were with Eric, but I guess it's congratulations."

Maybe Aunty Linda and Hadley had been right then? Eric was some kind of prize. And he'd been won by an outsider, clearly.

"It is" I agreed.

She paused for a moment, and then reconsidered. "I'd better get to work" she said, and then she turned and walked back to the main part of the restaurant and I went out into the carpark to see if we were scraping Tray off the asphalt or not.

"Hey Mum" he said, sprinting over to me. "Do we still have my water bottle? I haven't seen it since lunch."

We drove home with Tray grumbling a bit that he didn't have a water bottle anymore and Eric lecturing him on the importance of remembering where you put your stuff. Yeah, because Eric was so good at demonstrating that one himself.

And then it was the usual routine of baths, made more important by the fact we had to make some kind of showing as a family the next day. Pam was not impressed that it was another day she wasn't going to get to see Miriam and wanted to invite her to the funeral. I pointed out that I didn't think Miriam really wanted their first outing to be a funeral, but Pam wasn't buying it. The concept of a funeral didn't mean a lot to her, after all.

And I had to send Sam back into the shower when I realised he hadn't washed his hair the first time. "I'm going to grow my hair like Dad had it" he said. "In that photo."

Crap. I'd hoped he wouldn't see that. I didn't know how to tell him that no way was his hair ever going to look like Eric's in that photo. Not only was a slightly different shade, but Sam's hair had weird cowlicks and things that Eric's just didn't. Even my hair didn't look like Eric's, I was stuck with curls. Only Pam could match it for straightness, but hers was about four shades lighter and occasionally looked silver. So I just stuck with saying that if he wanted long hair, he'd better get used to washing it.

And once everyone was in bed, or at least confined to their bedrooms trying to discover if the millionaire playboy would ever realise that his hard-working and loyal P.A. was really the girl for him, and dump the hotel heiress who'd been toying with his affections while their fathers tried to put together a deal, I found Eric in the bedroom simply staring at the suit he'd hung over the door of the wardrobe.

I guess it was kind of real now and no amount of family outings could put off what had to happen the next day.

I didn't have anything to say that wasn't going to sound trite and stupid, so I sat next to him on the edge of the bed and put my arm around him. Eric in turn lifted his arm to pull me closer. That was nice. We just sat there for a bit like that.

"I'm not jealous" I said in the end. "Of Xena…who I had to give back to Pam, by the way. But that's OK. I know she's in the past and you found a much better Kiwi girl."

"Yep" Eric said. "I did." He kissed the top of my head. "You're my best friend, Sookie" he said. "I'm glad you're here, when I have to do…this."

"I'm glad I'm here too" I said. "Even if we have to do crappy things, I'd rather it was both of us. And we did manage to have a good day today. I liked Sacramento. I even liked the trains, and I never thought I'd say that."

Eric nodded. "It was good. And we didn't lose anyone."

"Only one water bottle. That's almost like…normal attrition for our family. At least there are still six of us."

"Seven, Sookie. There's meant to be seven of us."

"There is?" I said, trying to sound astonished. "Well, crap. I'll have to do a head-count and figure it out. Oh well, we'll just replace whoever it is with one of those kids from next door."

Eric laughed, but I could hear the sadness behind it. My heart just ached for him, but I couldn't change anything, couldn't make it go away, couldn't tell him to call off the funeral because none of us wanted to go and the kids had voted for another trip to Disneyland instead. He had to do it, even if it was shitty. It was like childbirth, you didn't have a choice once the ball was rolling.

"It'll be better on the other side of it" I said to him. "But now we'd better get ready for bed, or we'll just be tired and grumpy in the morning."

We took turns in the bathroom as this ensuite was a lot smaller than ours. I was still itching to get it cleaned properly, but that was going to have to wait. Tomorrow I just had to be there for Eric.

When Eric got into bed I moved over and placed my head on his chest and listened to his heart beating for a bit while he ran his hand up and down my back. He wasn't wearing a shirt and his skin felt hot against my face. After a while I started to trace circles on his stomach with my finger.

I moved my circles up higher, to Eric's chest, and ran a finger over his nipple. All of a sudden the mood changed, although we stayed in our original positions, me running my hand over Eric's chest and stomach and dipping down to the waistband of his boxer shorts every so often, while his hand moved down my back to my bottom and then back up again.

"We'll have to be quiet" Eric whispered to me. "The walls are thin and the boys are just on the other side of us."

"Um…OK" I agreed. I wasn't the loud one anyway.

I snuggled a bit closer to Eric and stuck my bum out so he could reach it a bit better, and then I licked one of his nipples, and giggled slightly when he shivered. "Shush" Eric warned.

"Mmm" I agreed, as I pushed myself up onto my hands and started kissing all the way down his chest, while Eric stretched with his arms above his head. I grabbed his underwear and whispered "Lift up" and he did, enabling me to pull them off him and throw them onto the floor. And then I took his penis in my mouth and ran my tongue around the tip while I felt it harden.

"Ohhh" Eric sighed, and he reached down and grabbed one of my breasts through the fabric of my tank top. "That's good" he said.

"Shhhh" I said, without moving my mouth and it was Eric's turn to laugh. But only quietly. We were pretty good at this being quiet thing.

I concentrated at the task at hand and after a minute or so I stopped and sat up. "Oh" Eric complained. "I was enjoying that" he whispered.

"I could tell" I whispered back, as I pulled off my tank top and shuffled out of my pyjama shorts.

I lay down and Eric rolled over so he was above me and he kissed me. He kissed me for a very long time while his hand roamed around my body. And then his mouth kind of followed the trail his hand had taken.

In the back of my mind I'd been carrying around the idea that when we had sex it would be passionate and kind of primal and very like the sex we'd had in the motel bathroom after we'd visited his Dad previously. The time that may have resulted in the small child who was currently asleep in another room being watched over by a Xena figurine on the bedside table.

But it wasn't like that at all. This was something else entirely. It was gentle and it was intimate and I loved every minute of it.

"I really love orgasms" I whispered to Eric, as he moved from his position between my legs.

"I'm pretty fond of giving them to you" he whispered back.

"Go on then, let's have another one." I hooked a leg around him and tried to pull him a bit closer.

"You're bossy" he grumbled, but then he entered me and the next sound he made could only be described as a grunt of happiness.

"That's so good" I said, but the only response I got from Eric was a quiet "Yes" as he started to move back and forth, just rocking slight and causing some rather lovely sensations in certain places.

The only sound after that was our combined breathing, mine slightly louder than Eric's, but maybe only because I was closer to it. And then I felt the tension building again, so I put my feet on the mattress and angled my hips and pushed up to meet Eric and get another one of those orgasms I was so fond of. And that one was good too.

"Ohhh" Eric said, as he buried his face in my hair. I felt his back tense up and he thrust harder several times before he shuddered and went very still, his weight dropping further onto me.

"Yeah" I said, kissing his chest. "Nice." I lay there enjoying the weight of him and the feeling of closeness.

"I love you, Sookie" Eric whispered.

"I love you too" I said.

**Thanks for reading!**


	32. Chapter 32

**A/N So I went to the zoo on Friday. No drunk guys with loud kids I could make fun of, but apparently an ostrich doing a big wee is far more interesting than a baby giraffe. I don't know why, it just is!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Eric was incredibly quiet the morning of the funeral. It was to be expected, of course, and the kids did a really good job of masking it in the general noise that filled our house for no other reason than the simple fact we had a lot of people all talking at once.

But Eric didn't even tell anyone to fuck up, so it was kind of noticeable to me that something was off. It wasn't anything I could do something about though, and he'd already left to go to the funeral home and make sure everything was set. All I could do was get on with trying to get the kids dressed.

Pam was wearing a dark blue sundress with a green floral print and a light blue cardigan over the top and white sandals. She looked very pretty. She looked so pretty she'd gone next door to show Miriam just how pretty she looked. I hoped she remembered to come back.

Sam and Tray weren't showing any desire to pretty themselves up though, although at least Tray managed to get his pyjamas off before putting his trousers on this time. A shirt and shoes would have helped though and I really didn't see why I had to explain that they were required for a funeral.

"But it's hot!" he complained.

"Really hot" Sam agreed.

"Uh-huh, and I have to wear pantyhose" I said to them, but they weren't particularly sympathetic to my plight, and Amelia was downright rude. "Yeah" she said. "Or else everyone can see those little veins in your legs that look weird."

She was in a bit of a huff because I was wearing my black dress and she really wanted to wear it herself. I don't think she had quite grasped the idea that I got first dibs at my own wardrobe. In the end she'd had to settle for wearing her own black skirt and my black V-necked t-shirt which she thought kind of sucked because I'd refused her request for an emergency shopping trip before we left New Zealand. Now she was just hanging around in the boys' room throwing out helpful comments.

I had hoped that after the whole debacle with Yvetta and the party Amelia would be a little bit nicer, but she seemed determined to push the boundaries these days and we'd clashed not only over the dress, but over whether she could wear my heels, or any makeup. Every interaction seemed to end with me saying no and Amelia getting stroppy about it. It was exhausting.

Felicia was still in her pyjamas. "No" I said, as she walked past the door, hoping she'd know what I was saying no to.

"She's so weird" Amelia mused. "I can't believe we're related sometimes."

"We're not though, eh Mum?" Tray asked.

"Of course you are" I assured him. He didn't look reassured. "Really?" he asked. "I thought all the girls came from somewhere else."

"No, you're all mine" I said to him. "So please get dressed so you don't show me up."

"He's weird too" Amelia commented. "Actually, they're all a bit weird."

"I'm not!" Sam protested. "There's nothing wrong with me!"

"Oh, there is so much wrong with you I don't even know where to begin" Amelia said, and Sam gave her a pretty good imitation of Eric's best 'I'm really annoyed that you said that' look, but Amelia ignored it, sighed loudly, and sat down on the bed. "This is taking _forever_!" she announced.

"What are you talking about?" Felicia said, as she walked in. She was wearing the same navy dress of Amelia's she'd worn to Hunter and Jenny's wedding, but she'd decided to wear black three-quarter length leggings underneath it. I wasn't even going to argue about that one.

"Well…" Amelia started to say, and I assumed she was going to continue on her theme of how all her siblings were incredibly weird, but instead Tray talked over the top of her. "Mum was saying you're my part-sister" he said, nodding at Felicia.

Felicia gave him a long, hard stare. "Whatever, butt-brain" she said in the end, and then she sat down heavily on the bed next to Amelia, who looked annoyed when she got jostled. Yeah, Felicia did not like any conversation around the fact that she had a different biological father, but I couldn't stop the boys being curious, if a little confused about the whole thing. I think they had trouble grasping that it was real, and not just some story I made up on the fly.

"OK" I said. "Tray, shirt. Sam, shoes. Amelia…you're OK. Felicia…did you brush your hair before it went into a ponytail? Oh, never mind, at least you've got shoes on. Where's Pam?"

"I'm here" Pam's voice said.

I gave her a once over. "Who did your hair?" I asked. She had a rather nice French plait and I wasn't sure that Amelia had had the chance to do it, given that she was managing the hair straighteners in one hand and a book in the other at one point that morning, while using the only New Zealand to American power adapter we owned and preventing me from using the hairdryer.

"Immanuel did it" Pam said. "It's a French _braid_."

"Uh-huh, that's the same as a plait, and who's Immanuel?" I wasn't sure whether I should be worried that Pam left the house and found not just friends but staff.

"No it's not!" Pam insisted. "And he's Miriam's brother."

"Is that what that kid's called?" Sam asked. "I couldn't work it out, 'cos of the accent."

"I thought you were good with the accent?" I asked, momentarily distracted from Pam. Sam shrugged. Pam continued talking. "He said that my hair is better than Barbie's is!"

"That's nice Pam" I said. "OK, then, let's get going and go and, uh…well, just um…best behaviour guys. For the whole thing. No talking, no fighting, no running off…Tray? No running off."

"What?" Tray asked, as he turned back from the door.

"No running off."

"I was getting my shoes!"

"At the funeral. No running off at the funeral. And…um, well…"

"Shut the fuck up and stay shut up?" Sam offered.

"Yeah, that. Probably. And, uh…" I tried to think what else to tell them.

"Anyone who's a fucking pain in the ass has to clean a bathroom" Felicia finished. "OK, so we can go then?"

"Yep" I said. "We can go."

"Did you pack my shoes?" Tray asked. "Or did you just pack Sam's?"

EPOV

I'd woken up feeling kind of sick inside. It wasn't a fucking pleasant feeling. And it didn't get any better over breakfast. Possibly that was due to the shitty fucking coffee we were drinking, but there could have been other reasons as well.

Sookie kept glancing at me, like she expected me to, fuck; I don't know what she was expecting. That was the part that fucking sacred me. She'd done this before, after all. So something bad was going to happen, wasn't it? I mean, fuck, even fucking Bill had rated an official Sad Day the year after his funeral. How bad was the actual fucking funeral itself?

She had said to me that it would be better when we were on the other side of it. I was relying on that fucking being true, although, fuck, every time I thought of what happened next I could just see fucking lists of things that had to be done so I could finish up Dad's affairs and sell the house and go home.

Maybe I'd get Sookie to write it all down? She was good at lists. I just, fuck. My brain hurt even thinking about it.

I left first, so I could go to the funeral home and talk to the guy who was doing the service again. "You sure you'll be OK getting everyone there?" I asked Sookie.

"Well, yeah. I mean I got them all here from New Zealand. Take your pyjamas off, first Tray!"

"Yeah. But, um…"

"Eric! My driving is not that bad. Plus I have that annoying voice in the car which tells me which way I have to turn. And the GPS is helpful too!" She gave me a big grin, and I tried to return it, I really fucking did. But I don't think I quite got there.

In the end I just left and drove to the funeral home. The hush of the place was somehow fucking deafening after being at home with all the kids.

I was ushered into an office and we went over the things the guy was going to say about Dad; where he'd been born, how long he'd worked at the plant, all the usual stuff. I guessed.

The guy, Mike Spencer who was about the same age as my Dad and knew him to drink with, kept saying how sorry he was for my loss. But he didn't seem surprised when I said I wasn't speaking. And he didn't press me.

And that said fucking volumes, didn't it? What son doesn't speak at his own father's funeral? How fucked up was everything if I didn't have anything to fucking say about my dad and that everyone knew why?

It was totally fucked up, that's what it was. And I was really fucking glad I didn't have to deal with them all anymore, watch them glance at me and try to figure out what to fucking say, then give up and pretend it was all OK anyway.

Fuck, they could fucking have this town.

When we'd finished it was just me, in the room where they were going to hold the service. Me, and Dad's fucking coffin.

I went outside to wait for Sookie and the kids.

She turned up just as a few other people were starting to drift in. Mostly women. They all nodded to me, but that was it. I was struggling to recognise any of their faces and I wasn't sure whether that was due to the passage of time, the fact they hadn't been around very long, or the fact that these were the ones who'd never actually made it as far as living with Dad, because surely the ones who had would want to run a fucking mile from this kind of occasion.

But thankfully that fucking van drove down the street and the windscreen wipers went on briefly before Sookie signalled a turn, and drove in the exit. She hesitated, and then drove on, joining up to the parking lot where she drove on the left-hand side of the space between the cars before slowly moving right and then, finally, parking the fucking van.

It wasn't fucking pretty to watch, but at least I didn't have to be alone here anymore. That was something.

SPOV

After a few minor mishaps on the way to the funeral parlour, we got there. I could see Eric standing out the front, trying to ignore the other people who'd turned up for the service. I hoped they were used to him and weren't too offended by the rudeness.

I unloaded the kids from the van and Pam took off to see Eric. "Daddy!" she yelled, as she ran alongside the garden that separated the building from the carpark. That earned a few 'aw' looks from the women who were filing into the place. Huh. I'd been kind of worried some of those girlfriends might have been butchered in the garage, but I hadn't really thought about them turning up here, figuring if they got away from Stan it would be good riddance to bad rubbish. Guess they saw it differently.

"Sookie!" one of them called out to me, and before I knew what the hell was going on, I got hugged. "I'm so sorry to hear about Stan" she said.

"Um…yeah…" I said, slowly.

"What happened to Stan?" Tray asked. "I thought he was at that pet motel thing?"

"She means the dead guy" Sam whispered back. Well, I think he was trying to whisper. "Dad's dad was called Stan."

"Pam named her cat after a dead guy?"

"The other two are named after vampires" Sam pointed out. "So they're dead too."

"Yeah…next cat we should name it after a zombie" Tray said.

"I don't think zombies have names" Sam mused.

"Zombies have more brains than either of you" Felicia hissed.

"Stop all whispering and being rude!" Amelia whispered. "You're making Mum embarrassed."

Well, they kind of were, but luckily the friendly woman whose name I couldn't remember hadn't noticed and while I was listening to the kids she'd been blathering on about her life after Stan. Trudi, she was Trudi, wasn't she? Oh well, I'd give it a go.

"It's nice to see you, Trudi" I said. "Although a shame about the circumstances."

"Oh, it is" she said. "I mean, I hadn't heard from Stan for a while because I moved when I got married, but you know. I was always quite fond of him." She looked a little wistful and I decided to leave her to it and move so we could actually see Eric, who, from the looks of it, was being told to admire Pam's hair.

"Oh, gosh. You had another one!" Trudi said, following my gaze.

"Yeah" I said. "That's, uh, Pam." I wasn't sure if I imagined it or not, but Trudi gave me kind of a funny look when I said that. I remembered that she'd thought I was over the hill when we'd met and I guessed she thought it was odd for me to go back and have another baby when I was nearly forty. A fifth baby at that.

Well…I didn't even have the energy to feel indignant about that today. I had other things to focus on. And I hadn't made it to him yet.

"See you later" I said to Trudi, and I walked over to Eric.

"You OK?" I asked him, and he nodded but didn't really get a chance to answer as Tray was pointing out that he got to wear sneakers because I forgot to pack his other shoes, Sam was complaining that he still had to wear his school shoes, Amelia was saying that Felicia was wearing sneakers too because she won't wear any other shoes, Felicia was trying to explain that shoes are not the key to happiness and Pam was describing, in detail, every pair of shoes that Miriam owned. They were all talking over each other and the noise was kind of deafening.

"I'm glad you guys are here" Eric murmured, and I resisted the temptation to ask "Really?" Sometimes there was nothing like a bit of distraction I figured.

And I needed it myself when I walked inside the funeral home. I'd forgotten how much I hated staring at coffins. Eric had been pulled aside to talk to some guy who must have known Stan and I was trying to make myself walk to the front and take a seat. Sam looked up at me, but didn't say anything, he just took my hand. That was nice. Tray bounded over next to Sam. "I don't think there's actually a zombie in there" he whispered loudly.

"No" I said. "I don't think it's a zombie."

"Vampires, moron. It's vampires that have coffins" Felicia said to him. "Zombies come out of the ground."

"Not all the time. Sometimes vampires don't have coffins" Amelia said.

"You're so lame" Felicia told her.

"I don't like vampires. Or zombies" Pam announced. "I like, um…fairies."

"Yeah, whatever Pam" Felicia said. "There won't be any of those either."

"OK, guys. Let's go and take a seat", and then I took a deep breath and walked down to the front of the room.

EPOV

There were more people than I thought there'd be. That was fucking weird. I couldn't quite figure out why they were here. Fuck, I didn't know why I was here. There were better things I could be doing, I was fucking sure of it.

I just couldn't list them right now.

All I could do was sit there, and stare at the coffin. I didn't even really hear what Mike was saying about Dad, I think there was some stuff about how long he'd worked at the plant, what a fun guy he was, and a whole bunch of stuff that didn't sound much like the dad I knew. At least they didn't mention his family. Didn't say what a great fucking family man he was.

And then I stopped listening anyway. I just sat there, not really focussing on anything until I felt Sookie take my hand. I just focussed on that.

The worst part was when it was all over. When the coffin just disappeared through the curtains and you knew what happened next and it wasn't fucking anything I wanted to think about.

And then it was done. And he was gone. And I was still here, holding Sookie's hand.

SPOV

Eric seemed a little on edge during the service, and it was hard to blame him. I was on edge just thinking about what the kids might do and whether Tray was going to run off. Fortunately he was so busy waiting to see what jumped out of the coffin, he stayed put. But I wasn't so sure about Eric. It wasn't that I was holding his hand so he couldn't go anywhere without me, but still. I wanted to know he was still there, in body, even if his mind was elsewhere.

When the service was over, and the coffin had been taken out the back to the sound of Tray whispering "That's it?" Eric turned to me and he looked so sad, it was awful. I pulled his hand up and kissed the back of it. There wasn't much else I could do. I just had to keep holding his hand.

EPOV

Once we moved into the area where they were serving refreshments after the service, I suddenly became the most popular person in the room. It was fucking terrifying. All those women that were clustered around suddenly wanted to come and talk to me and tell me how fond they'd been of me, and how much fun we'd had together and how much they were going to miss my dad.

Fuck. They must have been living in a parallel universe for the time they were in that house, because it really wasn't all fucking rainbows and unicorns like they thought it was.

And when it wasn't one of the women, it was some friend of Dad's. Someone who'd worked with him, who wanted to say how much he'd admired Dad's ability 'to never take any bullshit from management', which was code for never fucking got promoted because he couldn't keep his mouth shut when it was required. I'm sure it was fucking amusing to watch if you didn't have to deal with the fucking fall-out when Dad got passed over again and stormed around home in a fucking black mood.

And then there were the guys who'd gone drinking with Dad, who wanted to talk about how he could get 'any broad in the bar if he wanted her'. I'd seen some of those broads. I couldn't see it was anything to be fucking proud of.

There were some surprises too. I spent a while trying to avoid that fucking annoying woman from Oklahoma who'd turned up with her daughter, and, while I was doing that, I ran into someone I really didn't expect to see.

I wasn't looking where I was going, and before I realised it, he'd fucking hugged me. "I can't believe he's gone" Alexei said, and I was kind of worried he was going to cry. Instead he straightened up, wiped a hand across his eyes, and patted me on the arm. "Shit, man" he said, "Your dad, fuck, he was one of the good ones, you know? One of the _real_ good guys, man. Like, a real fucking gentleman. Fuck, I was bummed that we left, you know? But my fucking mother…fuck…she couldn't keep on the right path for anyone. And then I went into care for a while, so shit. Fucking shit happens, yeah."

OK. Fuck. It was nice to know that there were no hard feelings over the time I'd locked him in the garage when I was pissed at having to stay home with him, because I got the feeling that as skinny as he still was, you really didn't want to be on the wrong side of Alexei. Mostly that incident had just pissed off my dad, but I think it was more to do with the fact that I'd locked Alexei in with the Corvette and a bunch of tools that had got me on Dad's shit list, more than any concern he might have had for Alexei's mental health. As it was, Alexei had spent the time making homemade tattoos on his arm, which he'd obviously added to over the years given the way his forearms and neck were now covered with ink.

But you had to wonder. If he thought Dad was one of the fucking good guys, how many bad guys had he encountered?

"Yeah, uh, good to see you" I said, trying to work out what to say. "Um…why don't you go and get some food?" Fuck, he was still scrawny. I just hoped he could get near the food because from what I could see the boys were treating it as their own personal stash and were pretty much just clearing their way through the plates.

At least they were enjoying themselves.

"Yeah, man" Alexei said, sniffing loudly. "Yeah, let's fucking celebrate his life, you know?"

"Yeah" I agreed. "Let's, uh, you do that then."

I went to look at the flowers that had arrived. There was a very small bouquet from Dad's sister, and a very large one from Clancy and Indira. Clancy had wanted to come to the funeral, but only because, as he'd pointed out, "The third trimester makes Ginger really _mean_. Fuck, I'm better off away from her."

"Better off leaving her with two kids and two weeks to go?" I asked, and Clancy had to think about that one for a very long time before eventually he agreed that no, it wasn't a good idea.

Indira said she'd block him from airline websites if she had to, because she wasn't having Ginger coming in to the office and complaining about how shitty it was being left home alone with two kids under four when she felt so crap herself. Indira asked if I wanted her to come out, but I said that Sookie and the kids were here and I think she was relieved. Her new boyfriend seemed to be taking up most of her attention these days, well, him and the teenaged twin daughters he had from his first marriage. Indira seemed to think she'd done well to skip the crap Ginger was going through and go right to the good stuff, like shopping trips and sweet-sixteen parties.

So they were still in Shreveport, hopefully being fucking productive, and me, well I was going to get something to eat. And not just because that woman was heading my way again. She'd been so fucking persistent about me taking her daughter to prom that I nearly didn't think I'd get out of it then. I just didn't fucking go to prom, and that kind of solved the problem. If she still had the same fucking stupid ideas then I wasn't sure that she'd even take marriage as a barrier to me taking on that fucking daughter of hers. I really needed Sookie about now.

SPOV

I didn't see Eric for a while after they served the food, but that was OK because I was trying to keep an eye on everyone else. "So, we can eat all this food?" Sam asked.

"Well, not all of it. Some of it is for the other people here."

"They're all women!" Tray complained. "They keep pinching me on the cheeks."

"Aw! That's 'cos you're such an adorable little monkey!" Felicia said, sarcastically. "Not!"

"Whaf?" Tray asked, with his mouth full of club sandwich.

"They keep hugging Dad" Sam said, darkly.

"Is that OK?" Felicia asked. "That they're doing it?"

"Well, he's probably very sad" Amelia said. "I was very sad when my first dad died."

"You don't remember that!" Felicia said to her. "You said you didn't remember it! You just make this stuff up!"

"No I don't" Amelia huffed. "I know that it was very sad, wasn't it Mum?"

"It was" I agreed, thinking I really didn't need those memories coming back at a time like this. I wanted to focus on Eric, not on the other funerals I'd been to.

"I don't remember it" Pam said, nibbling daintily on a sandwich.

"You didn't exist" Amelia told her, and Pam's eyes went wide. "Don't exist? You mean I'm not real?" Poor Pam, she was used to us telling her all the things that might go bump in the night didn't exist and weren't real, and that was a really dumb statement to make around Felicia, because the next sound out of her mouth was a really big "Ow!"

"There you go" Felicia said. "You are real. You may thank me later."

"I'm not saying thank you for pinching me! Mummy! I don't have to say thank-you, do I?"

"No" I assured her. "Felicia don't be mean" I added, and Felicia rolled her eyes, which I decided to ignore in order to keep my attention on Eric and how much the boys were eating. "Tray, that's enough" I warned him, but he decided on adopting some selective deafness and he just moved further down the table of food.

"I knew I'm real" Pam said, huffily.

"Yeah, 'bout as real as Amelia's sadness" Felicia muttered, but Amelia had gone off and wasn't there to bite, which made Felicia a bit annoyed. Where was the fun in goading your sister if she wasn't there?

Tray and Sam's movement down the table was interrupted by some woman. "Aren't you two the spitting image of your Daddy?" she said, loudly. I half-wanted to go down there and point out that no, actually, Sam generally looked more like my side of the family and Tray, I thought, had my chin, but I decided against it. People saw what they wanted to with these things.

"Um…" Tray said, looking worried she was going to block his access to the food.

"He's over there. Dad. Just there, with that guy" Sam said, clearly trying to send the woman over to who he thought her real target should be. Eric was currently being hugged by some skinny, tattooed guy who looked like he needed feeding and who had a slightly nervy air about him that I'd seen before and didn't even want to think about. Fingers crossed this was the only time we'd see him.

"I know, and I said to him, what lovely boys he had" the woman said, beaming at Sam, and then she lunged to pat him on the head and Sam had nowhere to go but backwards into Tray who said "Ow!" loudly before he punched Sam in the arm. The woman didn't seem to notice, and she carried on towards Tray. I decided to go over and make sure they behaved.

Once she'd left and I'd calmed them down, I realised I hadn't seen Eric for a while. I found him hiding right at the back, drinking coffee.

"Oh" I said. "You found the coffee."

"Mmm" he agreed. "Amelia got it for me."

"Well, that's nice of her" I said, and we stood there in silence for a bit. "You can't hide here" I said, as I noticed him scanning the crowd.

"What?" he asked, clearly playing dumb.

"You can't hide back here."

Eric sighed, and looked annoyed. "It's just that fucking chick from Oklahoma…" he started to say, but I cut him off. "I don't know who that is" I told him, "but I'm not hiding you from her, and you have to go back out there."

Eric huffed, but started to look resigned to it. "Look at it this way" I said. "They're all just hanging around, waiting to talk to you so the sooner you get it over with, the sooner they'll all go and find somewhere else to be. After all, the food'll run out soon."

"The boys?" Eric asked.

"Oh, you know it" I said. "So come on, let's go and do this."

Eric looked at me. "Together?" he asked.

"Why not?" I said, shrugging. "Tell you what, I'll tell you the same thing I told Tray, I won't let anyone else pinch his cheeks or pat him on the head."

Eric nodded at where Tray was currently being mauled by some woman. "You're not doing a very good job of protecting him there, Sookie." I shrugged. "Yeah, but it'll be harder for them to get to you, and if I see anyone with a step-stool, I'll just kick it out of their hands. Easy." I looked at Eric and he almost smiled, that was a good sign.

And we made it through. Eventually everyone did leave, although some of those old blokes seemed to hang around forever, probably waiting for the booze to come out, in which case, they were out of luck. And every time we turned around there seemed to be another woman wanting to hug Eric and tell him what a lovely family he had, even when said family were engaged in a noisy dispute over something-or-other. I guess if they could have turned a blind-eye to Stan's pitfalls, they could probably turn a blind-eye to that too.

And so eventually, we got to go back to the house.

EPOV

I was so fucking glad when that was over. It was all just shitty, it really fucking was. I didn't want to talk to any of those people and I just…I wanted it to be over.

But when it was I still felt like shit. Sookie found me sitting in the bedroom. "Pam's next door, Sam and Tray are outside and I'm taking Amelia and Felicia to the supermarket. You OK?" she asked.

I really didn't have a fucking answer to that question.

"Yeah…it's just…fuck…I can't believe he's not coming back…" I said, and it sounded like such a fucking cliché. That was what everyone said, wasn't it? And I didn't know why the fuck my voice sounded weird when I said it. Because I wasn't that upset. It was over now, should be over now. He was nothing but dust. Why the fuck did I feel so fucking awful now?

Sookie didn't say anything; she just hugged me, for a long time. "I'm OK" I said. "I think…I just need to make a list, or something, of what to do next, you know, keep busy…"

Sam appeared in the doorway at that moment, clutching some of the sports equipment they'd found in the garage. "So, um, we're going to play cricket, want to come?"

"That's a baseball bat" I pointed out.

"Yeah…but, you know, it'll work. Tray's found some stakes that can be wickets. He and that Immanuel kid are out there now with the mallet trying to get them in."

"Yeah…maybe I'll just show you baseball" I said, hoping like fuck that Tray hadn't maimed anyone else's kid. Sam shrugged. "If you want" he said, and then he walked out.

"I'd better go" I said to Sookie. "Before something happens."

"Yeah" she said. "You go and make sure they know what they're doing." From outside we heard Tray yell "Hold it _still_ Manuel!"

"That's not his name!" Sam yelled. "I told you that."

"Fuck, they're loud" I said to Sookie, as I left the room.

SPOV

It was a day I wouldn't really want to do over again, but none of them ever are when it involves burying someone. Or having them cremated, in Stan's case.

Eric powered through it, but it was pretty clear it had affected him. He was trying so hard to keep it together and it nearly broke through when we were home, but luckily Sam picked that moment to display a total disregard for American sporting practices. I liked to think he knew what he was doing.

Amelia, Felicia and I went to the supermarket which seemed to take a terribly long time as we couldn't find anything and we had to keep stopping to marvel at the sheer amount of packaged food you could buy. "It's a whole lunch" Felicia would say. "In a box. Who buys lunch in a box?"

"Americans" Amelia said, haughtily and loudly. So loud several of the other shoppers in the aisle turned around to look at her. "What?" she said. "We're in _America_, so who else is it going to be?"

"Yeah, but it's mean to make fun of them" Felicia said.

"I wasn't making fun of them! I was answering your question!"

"Maybe it was a rhetorical question?" Felicia countered. "Maybe I didn't want you to?"

I was tempted to leave them to it, but if I'd learned nothing else in the fourteen and a bit years I'd been a mother I had learned that leaving your kids in a supermarket on purpose was a very bad thing.

Probably.

No it was. "Come on" I said. "I want to find, um…oh God. Where do you think they have the tomato sauce?"

"Well, it would be called ketchup for one thing" Amelia said, looking at me like I was an idiot.

"And it wouldn't be in this aisle" Felicia said, giving me the identical look.

When we got back, the game in the backyard was in full swing with Eric directing the three boys and at least distracted by it all. Felicia went out to show them how to do it properly and didn't take direction from Eric half as well. I noticed a little old lady from the house on the opposite to Miriam and Immanuel's place look nervously out her back door, and then retreat inside again. I guessed she wasn't used to the noise and mayhem.

I did roast chicken pieces for dinner, and it was only as I was about to dish up that I managed to swap Immanuel back for Pam. Poor Immanuel didn't want to go home and Pam didn't want to come back, so it was tempting to leave it the way it was. Pam was at least excited to show everyone the outfit she'd created for her Barbie out of Eric's mother's old blouse, and Mr Fluffy had been given a makeover too. He was now sporting a waistcoat and bow-tie in some kind of shiny silver fabric.

"Miriam made them for me!" Pam said, her eyes shining brightly. "Well, for Mr Fluffy. But really for me, because Mr Fluffy's mine. Miriam is _so_ nice, Mommy!"

"I'm Mummy" I reminded her. I wasn't sure if I was imagining it or not, but I thought maybe she was picking up the accent.

"Yeah" Pam said. "But here you could be Mommy, couldn't you? I mean, Miriam has a mommy, so I think that's nicer."

"I'm still Mummy" I said. Pam gave me a 'you're no fun' look, and ran off to show Eric the new wardrobe her toys were sporting.

That evening the kids were noisy and Eric was quiet, which was becoming the usual state of affairs. He did have a new burst of energy though, and had gone from being listless in the afternoon to enthusiastically making lists of all the things he needed to do.

"So tomorrow" he said, "I'll visit the lawyer, the bank and probably one of the realtors in town."

"Um, OK" I agreed. I felt the need to join in the enthusiasm. "I'll start the cleaning" I said. "I got some more products, so I'll have a really good go at the bathrooms and work my way from there."

"Yeah" Eric said. "That sounds like a plan."

And so we went to sleep on that note, but only after persuading Pam she couldn't invite herself for a sleep-over at Miriam's. She was upset that the next day Miriam and Immanuel were going to be visiting their grandparents and wouldn't be around. She wanted to get all the Miriam-time she could while she could.

I didn't want to even think about what flying back to New Zealand was going to be like.

So next morning, after breakfast, Eric set off out and I put on my old clothes and started my jobs. Amelia and Felicia drifted around complaining of boredom, and I sent them out for a walk, just to give me some peace. The boys at least had found some more of Eric's treasures and were busy outside, and that just left Pam underfoot.

In the end I stopped what I was doing, leaving the bathroom coated in mould remover, the furniture in Stan's old room all pulled out from the wall, the living room in disarray, and Pam and I made cheese scones and put them in the oven.

Then the doorbell rang.

I opened it, wishing I'd had time to change as I looked kind of grotty. "Hello" I said, to the heavily pregnant Hispanic woman on the other side.

"Yeah, so this house is for sale?" she asked. I wondered if she was the real estate agent Eric was organising.

"Um…it will be" I said. "But my husband was organising the listing..."

"Oh" she said. "Yeah, that realtor, she's a bitch. Wouldn't show me the other house I liked. So I heard that the old drunk guy who lived here died, and I thought I'd come out and say I want this place."

"You…want this house?" I asked.

"Yeah. Houses in this street, they don't come up very often, so I thought we could get this one." She tried to peer past me. "I'm Luna" she said. "Luna Garza."

"Oh" I said. "Nice to meet you." She didn't seem to want to shake hands, in fact I thought she really wanted to just barge past me and start measuring the place up. "So, uh, how did you hear it was…?"

She cut in. "For sale? Yeah, my husband's a cop. Said they were talking about it at the station, the loser nut-job son set fire to something when it happened. What a waste of time that call-out was. So, uh, the fire damage isn't that bad is it? Although I guess that'd take some off the price of the place, huh?"

"Um…" I wasn't sure where to start with that. "Um, no, there isn't any fire damage."

"Oh" she said, and her face fell. "Oh well, guess it's for the best. So, uh, you're cleaning the place? D'you mind if I just have a quick look?"

"Um…" I said. Were all American's this pushy? "Um, probably best to wait for the place to get listed. Plus, you know, we want to clean it up a bit."

"Well, it'd be wasted if they repainted it or anything" Luna said. "I want to do that myself. I've got plans, and I like bright colours, plus, you know, if they put new carpets in, then they think they get another five grand, etcetera. And no way am I paying above market prices."

"Uh-huh" I said, still at a loss for words but thinking that she and Eric would make a great pair. "Um…well, how about you come back tomorrow, when um, my husband will be here and the place won't be such a state…"

"Your husband?" she said, sharply, finally putting two and two together. "Oh. Ohhh. OK, yeah. About five o'clock? After my Lamaze class? I'll bring Eddie."

"Yeah, OK. We'll, uh, see you then" I said, glad that I'd got rid of her and could go back to my cleaning. I checked on the scones and Pam, who was in the kitchen watching them. "I'm still bored!" she complained.

"You could dust" I suggested.

"Not that bored" she grumped, as she gazed at the Barbie who had the new outfit.

I was heading back to the bathroom when I glanced out the front and saw someone else coming up the path. Were we going to be inundated with potential buyers now that Stan had been officially dispatched? I wasn't sure.

Although if anything this woman looked more like she might be the real estate agent, with her smart suit and her blonde French roll. She reminded me a bit of Grace Kelly, an older Grace Kelly. She was all long limbs and graceful neck and, well, elegance. I sighed. It might have been nice to get the place a bit more in order before Eric sent her here. Not to mention myself. If she was elegant I was…well, the opposite of that with my hair scraped back and my housework clothes on and my hands that smelt of cleaning products despite the rubber gloves I'd been wearing.

I sighed, and opened the door in time to see Tray and Sam run around the side of the house. They'd found some of those big guns that sprayed water out and were engaged in an on-going battle with them. The woman stopped half-way to the front door and just stared at them. Crap. I would too; she was probably worried they were going to soak her as well.

I tried to wave at them to tell them to watch out, but they ignored me. Thankfully the woman started to walk quickly up the path again, her heels clicking as she did so.

"Hello" she said when she reached me.

"Hi" I said, wondering why she didn't have anything to make notes with if she was here to appraise the place.

"So, um, you're Stan's…" she let that hang. She looked familiar, maybe she'd been at the service the day before. I just couldn't place her, and I clearly hadn't spoken to her. I wondered why she'd turned up and whether she was here to claim anything she thought she'd left. If she had, I was keeping her out until Eric got here, even if I had to get the boys to turn the water-guns on her.

"Daughter in law" I said, which seemed a weird thing to say. I'd never really identified myself as that before. Still, it was preferable to when Luna was here and I'd had to identify myself as the wife of the loser nut-job who burned stuff.

I waited for her to say who she was, but she just narrowed her eyes and looked me up and down. I knew I looked a mess and I didn't appreciate her pointing it out, even silently. And then Pam appeared at my side.

"Hello" Pam said.

"Hello" the woman said, dragging her eyes from me to Pam.

"I'm Pam" Pam said merrily, happy to have the distraction of a pretty woman to talk to.

She bent a little closer to Pam and all of a sudden her expression changed from somewhat imperious to a huge smile. And it was at that moment, before she even said the next words out of her mouth, that I put it all together and worked out exactly who she was.

"Well, isn't that lovely" she said. "That's my name too."

**Thanks for reading!**


	33. Chapter 33

**A/N It's Valentine's day here, so happy Valentine's day everyone! And the toddler says Happy Burfdy, because there's only one reason you get a card, as far as she's concerned. It's like baking, there's only one reason for doing that too, and she spends the entire time saying "Eat now? Eat now. Eat now!" as she waits to be allowed to lick the bowl.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

"It is?" Pam asked, wrinkling up her forehead. "But no one else is called Pam…they're all Bella."

I watched Eric's mother as I was now thinking of her, and she looked a little bit confused about that. Well…tough. Should have been around earlier, I thought, and then you'd get the reference to the rest of Pam's little world.

"Mostly people call me Pamela" Eric's mother said.

"I only get that at school" Pam mused. "Mainly because otherwise people all tell me that my name rhymes with Sam's. And I _know_! I know because Felicia tells me all the time. It's old news." Not to Pamela, who was hiding her confusion by giving Pam a good once-over.

I took a deep breath. "Would you like to come in?" I asked. "Eric's, um, out. But you're more than welcome to wait for him."

Pamela turned her attention back to me. "Mmm" she said. "You're the wife?" I felt I'd made that one clear earlier, but maybe she was hoping I was just a ruse put here to fool her.

"Eric's wife. I'm Sookie." I clarified, in case she maybe thought I was shacked up with Stan. I had said daughter-in-law, hadn't I? I was working hard on outwardly remaining calm but inside I was doing a weird hand-flapping dance of total fluster. This was Eric's _mother_. After all this time, she'd shown up. I hadn't been expecting it, and I wasn't sure if Eric had been expecting it either. We hadn't covered off the game plan for this situation and, as much as my inclination might be to stand here and tell her exactly what I thought of her, she wasn't my mother and it wasn't me she'd walked out on. I had to wait and see what Eric's reaction was to all of this.

So there was nothing to do in the meantime but be polite. I didn't have to like it. I just had to do it.

"Uh-huh" she said, not really listening to me but peering inside the house. "Well, I suppose I could" she said, and I resisted the urge to slam the door in her face. I was doing this for Eric, I reminded myself. Good impression. Let's make a good impression.

And you never knew your luck, maybe she'd turn out to like me more than Lorena ever had?

Well, I could hope.

"We have cheese scones" Pam said. "I made them!"

"Scones?' Pamela asked, wrinkling her nose.

"Well, come on in!" I said, way, way, too brightly.

Pam skipped down the hall and Pamela followed her and I forced myself to walk along behind them, really wishing I could just go and hide somewhere else.

"I like your skirt" Pam said, as we entered the living room.

"It's a suit" Pamela said. I pretended she didn't glance at what I was wearing.

"Daddy wears suits" Pam said, as she watched Pamela sit in the hard chair in the corner everyone tried to avoid. Pam sat primly on the couch. "Mum doesn't wear suits. She wears trackpants to work. I don't like trackpants, especially not when I have to wear boys' ones. I had to put a rainbow on the last ones." She looked expectantly at Pamela who stared at the walls. "Same wallpaper" she murmured.

"It's very pink" Pam said, obviously trying to follow along with the adult conversation. "I like pink."

That made Pamela pay attention to her again. "Of course you do" she said. "It suits your complexion."

"But Amelia likes purple and Felicia likes green" Pam sighed. "There's not a lot of pink." That statement probably meant sod all to Pamela, but she didn't press for details, still looking around the room and taking everything in. And then she looked out the window and saw not only the boys in the backyard, but the fact that Tray was using a half-burned La-Z-Boy as cover.

"I better go and check on the scones" I said, as I heard Pam say. "That's my brothers. They're _boys_", like they had some kind of terrible affliction they couldn't help.

I didn't hear if Pamela said anything to that as I hustled into the kitchen and pulled the scones out of the oven, then tried to make coffee while also re-doing my ponytail. I washed my hands, and got out the butter and put the coffee in a coffeepot, and got out milk and sugar and tried to fit it all on a tray. And then I carried it in.

"Coffee?" I asked Pamela.

"Sure" she said.

"Scone?"

"Oh, no. I don't think so" she said.

"Help yourself to milk and sugar" I said, and then I sat down and conversation lapsed for a good, long, painful moment.

Pam ran out of the room and ran back in with her arms stuffed full of her belongings. "This is my Barbie. She has a new dress. My friend Miriam showed me how to make it. And this is the monkey I knitted. And this is my Xena, and this is Mr Fluffy, and Miriam made his clothes. Miriam is _really_ nice. She lives next door."

Pamela appraised the offerings. "Very nice" she said. "And…you like fashion?"

Pam shrugged. "I like some clothes. Not boy's clothes. And I like it when I have things first, but I don't get everything first."

"That's a shame" Pamela said, in a conciliatory way.

"Yeah" Pam sighed. "One day when I'm big Mum'll let me buy stuff myself, but right now, I have to shop out of the storage boxes in the roof. The stuff in the boxes isn't that great and there might be rats. Well, Daddy thought he saw a rat and made a funny noise, and he tried to put Stan up there to look for it, but Stan didn't want to go and he bit Daddy and then Daddy made a _lot _of noise and said that Stan was going back to the SPCA but I said he couldn't do that because sometimes he's just mean to Stan for no reason. It's not Stan's fault he has fangs!"

During that speech Pamela had gone from slightly interested to completely perplexed. "Pam's cat is called Stan" I supplied.

"You…called your cat Stan?" she asked Pam.

"Yeah, Mummy said I couldn't call him Eric because it would be too confusing, but I don't think so. I mean, I don't feel confused, and you've got my name."

"I think you were named after me" Pamela said conspiratorially, as though she was sharing some huge secret with her.

Pam frowned at that. "Really?" she asked. "So you had it first?"

"Of course" Pamela said.

Pam sighed loudly. "I don't get anything first" she muttered.

"It's a family name" Pamela said. "I was named after my mother, and you were named after me."

"Who did Daddy get named after?" Pam asked.

Pamela shrugged. "No one" she said.

"So he got his name first, and I didn't?" Pam asked.

"It's a special name" Pamela said. "It's a family name."

Pam looked a bit less than impressed at that, and she grumbled "It still wasn't mine first." I was worried that she might say something rude to Pamela. And then something really weird happened, just as I was contemplating whether I should let that one lie or tell Pam that worse things happened at sea, Pamela reached right over and tucked Pam's hair behind her ear. "Don't worry, sweetheart" she said. "Your day will come."

Pam just stared at her, probably not sure what to do when someone actually cared she had to wear hand me down sweatshirts. "Really?" she asked.

"Oh yes" Pamela said, "A beautiful little thing like you. You'll get everything you want, sweetheart. You just have to know how to make it happen."

Pam's face lit up. I had an uneasy feeling about it all. And then Sam and Tray burst into the room.

"I'm hungry" Sam said, as he stood dripping on the carpet. "Oh, scones are ready."

"Yay" Tray said, pushing past Sam to get at them. Oh God, I thought, they had to behave like that didn't they. I gave Pamela an apologetic smile as she visibly recoiled. Hmmm.

"This is Sam…and Tray" I said. "Tray, don't use that much butter. Guys, this, is, uh…"

"You can call me Pamela" she said, icily.

Sam shrugged. "That's her name too" he said, pointing to his sister and talking with his mouth full.

"Why don't you guys go and get a drink?" I suggested.

"I want pink milk" Pam said to them.

"Get it yourself Pam" Sam said.

Pam glared at him, and the three of them stomped out.

"Sorry" I said. "About the, uh, dripping…" I stopped myself before I apologised for the mud on the carpet too. It wasn't her house anymore and she wasn't the one who was going to be cleaning it up later.

"Well" Pamela said. "Boys will be boys. I guess. Eric wasn't any better at that age." I didn't know what to say to that. It was the kind of thing lots of people said, after all. The kind of thing lots of people said about their own kids even. But it just sounded kind of, well, kind of cold.

Or something. Maybe I was projecting. Maybe she was a lovely person who was driven out of the family by Stan's nastiness.

"You know Daddy?" Pam said, walking back into the room and carefully carrying a full glass of strawberry milk. She bumped into the table and the milk sloshed but, luckily, didn't spill. It didn't stop Pam muttering "Fuck" though and making Pamela wince.

"He's my son" Pamela said.

Pam just frowned at that. She wasn't used to grown-ups who still had parents. Even Stan had really just been a name to her, she'd never met him.

Tray was right behind her though. "I thought you were dead too" he said, and then he slurped up some chocolate milk and reached for another scone.

"Not dead" Pamela said, fixing him with a very sharp, dark-blue stare.

"So where have you been?" Sam asked, as he took another scone.

Well, this would be interesting. Pamela looked thoughtful. And then she looked relieved. "I live here" she said. "You live in Australia."

"No…" Tray said, as he considered that statement. Oh God, please don't forget where New Zealand is, I thought.

"Not Australia" Sam said. "New Zealand. It's different. Immanuel thought we were from Australia but he was wrong too."

"Mmm" Pamela said, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Mostly I got the impression she was just glad to not be answering any questions about herself.

"Immanuel did my hair" Pam said. "He said I had nice hair, like a Barbie."

"You do" Pamela said, smiling at her. "Very pretty."

"I'm growing my hair" Sam announced. Pamela wrinkled her nose. Pam said "Immanuel could braid it then." Tray snaffled up another scone while he thought no one was looking.

"So, do you do ballet?" Pamela asked Pam.

"No" Pam said. "I play soccer though."

"Me too" Tray said, but Pamela didn't look at him. Sam kind of frowned at that.

"What else do you like to do?" Pamela asked Pam.

"Oh, um…well I like making things. And putting glitter on things. Look! I have glitter nail polish!"

"That's lovely, but your cuticles need work" Pamela said, which I found deeply odd. What person in the world cares about a five year old's cuticles?

"They do?" Pam asked. "I…don't know what that is."

"This part" Pamela said, reaching out and pointing with a long, immaculately manicured nail. It was painted a particularly beautiful shade of deep rose. "You should have this part trimmed so that it's nice and neat."

"Oh" Pam said.

"See? Like mine. I have someone to do mine for me though."

"Sometimes Amelia does mine" Pam volunteered.

"Well, tell her the next time to do your cuticles."

"Um…Amelia's her sister, not a manicurist" I butted in.

"Sister?" Pamela asked. "I thought there were only three children?"

"Nope" Sam said. "The big girls are out. Somewhere. Thank fuck. They're both a bit bitchy today."

Pamela's looked at him sharply. "How many…?" she asked.

"Two more girls" I confirmed. Before I could stop him Tray said "They're part-sisters."

"Oh" Pamela said, looking thoughtful. She took a sip of her coffee, pulled a face and put the cup back down. "So…five children?"

"Yes."

"And you brought them all here? For the funeral?" She looked at me like I was slightly bonkers and it irritated me no end. I decided there was really only one way to deal with this. I channelled Lorena.

"Well" I said, fixing her with a smile. "I couldn't possibly have left them at home. They're my children and so very dear to me. It would just feel wrong to be without them." I carried on smiling while she narrowed her eyes at me, suggesting she really didn't like that I'd said that. Well, she was out of luck. I'd seen that look a million times already from Eric, and Pam and Sam had pretty good versions of it too. I was immune.

The conversation lapsed again. "So, um, what do you do?" I said, trying to cast around for something to say.

Pamela turned her smile on me. It was kind of scary. "I own some salons" she said. "A chain, actually. Well, I had to do something when I found myself alone like that. It's not easy being a woman by yourself, you know?"

Well I did, actually. But I wasn't going to get into that now.

"Mum owns Jumping Beans" Sam said, and then I had to explain what that was. When I'd finished Pamela didn't look much clearer, or that impressed. She didn't ask what Eric did, but then, maybe she knew? God, this was awkward.

"I'm going back out" Sam announced.

"Sweet" Tray said, and then they stood up to walk out, although Tray tripped over his feet and Pamela winced. Again. For some reason I found that even more irritating, but then felt bad that I did. I mean, she hadn't been around little boys for a long time, so maybe she'd forgotten what it was like.

Or maybe she'd never liked it in the first place.

Surely she could still suck it up though? And make nice with the grandkids?

And then I heard Amelia shout from the front door "We're back!" just before she and Felicia appeared in the room. "Oh" Amelia said, when she saw Pamela.

"This is Pamela. She's uh…" Pam stalled.

"She's Dad's mother" I said, not sure if she wanted the grandmother tag just yet. She did. Well, kind of, anyway, because as I said that she'd turned to Pam and said "I'm your grandmother, sweetheart." She hadn't really addressed that to the other two girls in the room though.

"Uh-huh" Amelia said, and she sat down.

"Like Nana?" Felicia asked.

"Not really" Amelia said. "She was Bill's mother, this one's Eric's mother." Pamela gave her a sharp look, designed, I think, to let her know she was being rude. Amelia clearly didn't care.

Felicia shrugged and reached for a scone. "Good walk?" I asked.

"She walks too slowly!" Felicia complained.

"She wouldn't let me stop and look at anything!" Amelia complained.

"Shops are boring!"

"You're boring!"

They gave up arguing and started eating. "I just wanted to get coffee" Amelia muttered.

"Yeah, a bucket of coffee. Drink that" Felicia said, pointing at the table. "Plus you saw that cute guy in the Starbucks, but he's, like, really old and you're just a kid."

"I'm fourteen!" Amelia countered. "He wasn't that old!"

"_And_ you have a boyfriend. I'm telling Riley!"

"Oh, no you're not!" Amelia said.

"Yeah? You wait." Felicia threatened and she took a bite of scone. All this time Pamela had just been watching them. "You can see" she mused. "The boys yes…the little one, definitely, spitting image. But I can see they're not related."

"Not related to who?" Amelia asked.

"Me" Pamela said. "You don't look like my family."

Felicia frowned. Amelia shrugged. "I'm not a Northman" she said. "I'm a Compton. It was very sad when I lost my first dad, and I cried. A lot. Daddy's been quite sad that he lost his dad, but he hasn't cried."

"No" Pamela said. "I suppose…" She didn't finish that thought. "I'm not a Northman either" she said in the end.

"I am" Felicia said. "I like my name!"

"And you are…?" Pamela asked.

"Felicia."

"I'm Amelia Compton" Amelia said. "It's very nice to meet you."

"And you" Pamela said, inclining her head and suppressing a smile at Amelia's sudden burst of maturity. Well, attempt at it anyway. "There's no freakin' coffee" Amelia then muttered, trying to pour some out, and she stomped off to the kitchen.

"It's always the bloody coffee with her now" Felicia complained.

"Um…I'm not sure how much longer Eric's going to be" I said, wondering how much longer we were all going to sit there and wishing Eric would just turn up and get this over with.

"That's no problem" Pamela said. "I'm enjoying visiting with Pamela here." She reached over and took Pam's hand and Pam beamed at her. Felicia looked at them oddly.

"We're just here for a little while" Felicia said. "And then we have to go home because the school holidays will be over. And I have to be there for netball."

Amelia walked back in holding a cup. "I have to go back to hand in that assignment."

"Have you done that assignment?" I asked her.

She shrugged. "Working on it." Yeah, I think that was code for reading far too many romance novels.

"That's a shame" Pamela said, gazing at Pam. "Maybe you could come back and visit me sometime? We could do all sorts of fun things."

"Oh!" Pam said, her face lighting up. "Could we go to Disneyland? I've never been."

Pamela wrinkled her nose. "Well, we could think of something fun. Maybe shopping or something? And I could take you to get your nails done. And my house has a pool."

"It does?" Felicia asked. "I'll ask Dad if we can come over."

Pamela looked over at Felicia. "I'm not sure you'd enjoy it. As much as Pam would" Pamela said, with the air of someone trying to break bad news gently. She did a crap job of it though.

And Felicia's face just fell as she suddenly realised she wasn't wanted. Not as part of the love-fest Pam and Pamela were currently involved in.

I was trying to work out what to do next and how to console Felicia, when something completely odd happened. Amelia looked at Felicia as her shoulders slumped down, and then she turned her gaze back to Pamela. And then she did a complete transformation, she sat up straighter and she looked down her nose and she said in a sickly-sweet voice "I'm sure you're right. I can't imagine it would be that much fun."

I didn't know whether to laugh or tell her off. I might have thought that I could do a passable imitation of Lorena but who knew Amelia could get her exactly? I guess she had genetics on her side. It was kind of impressive.

"Not as much fun as Disneyland?" Pam asked, kind of oblivious to the growing tension in the room.

"No, Pam" Amelia said, kindly. "I'm sure we could have more fun somewhere else."

Pam looked at Amelia, and her face lit up. "You'll play with me?" she asked.

"Uh-huh" Amelia said, gazing at Pamela. Felicia watched on curiously.

"This afternoon? Will you do my nails? And my cuticles?"

"Oh, whatever you want" Amelia said. "After all, you're my little sister. I love you." I half-expected Felicia to say something snide, or snort, or point out she didn't want her big sister's love but instead she smiled at Amelia and said "We're very close. It's nice being in a big family, isn't it Pam?"

"Yep!" Pam said, completely distracted from the new grandmother now by the prospect of both her big sisters actually paying attention to her, and being nice in the process. It was a true red-letter day for Pam.

"It's nice to see step-siblings that are so close" Pamela said, and she sounded slightly snarky about it.

"Half-siblings" Amelia said. "But it doesn't feel like that, does it Leesh? Daddy's always been there for us."

"Yep" Felicia agreed. "I don't remember the other guy."

Pamela looked at the pair of them. I wondered if I was really needed and what the effect of leaving that mould remover on for all this time was going to be. Crap.

The boys burst back inside at that moment. "Is it nearly lunchtime?" Tray asked.

"Soon" I said.

"Cool" Tray asked. "My gun's a bit buggered now."

"I think there's another one in the garage" Sam said.

"Yeah, but it's kind of shit. Dad said that one won't get anything because it doesn't shoot straight." Then they paused and looked at the room. "Can we play the PlayStation?" Tray asked.

"Not right now" I said.

Tray sighed, but he sat down on the floor. And started picking his foot. "Think I've got a prickle" he announced.

Pamela looked aghast and I had finally had enough. "You know" I said. "I think Eric's going to be tied up for the rest of the day. Now that you've had a chance to meet your…uh, everyone, why don't I get Eric to call you sometime?"

"Sure" Pamela said. She stood up and smoothed out her skirt, still looking at Tray who was now wrestling Sam as Sam had pushed him over while he was mostly paying attention to his foot.

Yep, she didn't like little boys. Not even little boys who looked like her own son. Who were around the same age as her son had been when she walked out on him. That made a few things clear to me.

The only one of us she did like was Pam, the tiny blonde girl who looked like her and had the same name. She should get a doll and be done with it, I thought. Get a doll and leave us the hell alone.

"It was…" I struggled with what to say to her at the front door. It hadn't been nice, it wasn't pleasant, and I didn't want to see her again. She'd upset some of the kids and I was worried she'd upset Eric. I wished she hadn't come.

She gave me a card. It read Pamela Ravenscroft. Pam's Pampering. I wondered where the hell her name had come from.

I didn't have the energy to care though.

"Tell Eric I was here" she said, sounding all business-like and clipped now that Pam wasn't around. And kind of treating me like I was Eric's staff.

"He's great, you know" I said to her. "Eric. He's a great dad and he really loves those kids. All of them."

"Uh-huh" she said, only sounding mildly interested.

"We're very lucky to have him. I think it's a shame you missed out on that." I waited to see what she'd say to that.

"You don't know what it was like" she said. "With…Stan" she nodded at the house, as though Stan was sitting in there.

"I can guess. And I don't blame you for leaving him. I do blame you for leaving Eric. Maybe it's wrong of me to say that, and maybe Eric would be mortified if he knew, but I don't care. I have five children and I wouldn't walk away from any of them. I don't know how you could. It's not my place to be angry at you, but I am just…dumbfounded, I think? Yeah, just astonished that you did it."

Pamela sighed, and looked at me as though I was a child who couldn't possibly understand. "I didn't know what to do with him" she said. "He was a boy, what did we have in common? He just wanted to run around and knock things over and it was hard enough to take him shopping once he stopped being able to wear that harness-thing. I just…motherhood wasn't for me." She made it sound as though motherhood was some of lifestyle choice, like being green and recycling your rubbish.

"And yet you'd had a child" I said. I wasn't naïve, and it wasn't like Eric was born in the dark ages. She'd had choices. Sure I didn't want a world without Eric but she'd had a choice in the matter.

"I thought…" she said, and then she laughed. It was quite pretty and musical, but somehow tinged with something darker and more menacing. It was like Pamela herself, the beauty on the outside covering something nasty at the core. "It was very new technology. They said I was having a girl."

Um…wow. OK.

"And I didn't want to do _that_" she continued. "Again. Plus Stan was clearly out having affairs. I was better off without either of them. And I have been."

"But Pam's another matter?" I asked.

"I have a right to know my grand-daughter" she said, looking down at me as though she could just will me to see it her way.

Well, that hadn't worked on me yet.

I sighed. "Pamela, we could stand here all day and dispute that fact, but really, it's going to be Eric's call. Right now, I have five kids to feed and mould remover to get off the tiles in the bathroom. I might see you, I might not. I hope you're happy either way. Goodbye." And then I walked inside while she spluttered behind me. Yeah, she didn't like me having the last word.

Guess we knew where Eric got that little trait from.

With Pamela finally gone, I could get on with all the things I was supposed to be doing. The kids seemed OK after her visit, and the noise around the table at lunchtime was about the usual level. Felicia was maybe slightly off, but it was hard to say. She'd been getting increasingly bored hanging around the house, so it may not have had anything to do with her newly discovered step-grandmother.

I did, however, have to figure out a way to tell Eric about her visit. I practiced in my head all the ways I might bring it up. I thought about whether I should maybe not say anything, although my chances of swearing all five kids to secrecy were pretty slim.

What I should have done, of course, was warn them not to spill the beans before I got there. But I was busy scrubbing the toilet in the main bathroom again when he came in the door and I'd barely had time to straighten up and peel off my rubber gloves before I could hear Pam's squeal of "Daddy!" as she went flying down the hall to greet him.

And as I walked out into the hall myself I heard her saying it. "We had a lady visit with us. A pretty lady. She had my name. She had it first, she said. I never get anything first. Can I get ballet lessons?"

Eric went really pale and I wasn't sure for a second whether he was going to faint or not. I just hoped that if he was going to keel over he put Pam down safely first.

But he managed to stay upright. "That's, uh…interesting, Pam."

"Uh-huh. She said my cuticles needed work."

"Did she?" Eric asked, sharply, as he looked over at me. I wasn't sure what to say. He looked really pissed off, and I felt like I should be apologising for letting her in the house. Once again, I really wished we'd covered this off in some kind of plan beforehand.

Eric put Pam down and walked into the bedroom. I followed. "She just showed up" I said. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry? Sorry for what?" Eric said, not looking at me. "Sorry she was here, or sorry she left thirty years ago?" He sounded pissed, and as much as I knew I wasn't the real target, it still hurt that he was taking it out on me.

"I just…" I wasn't sure what to say. What was I sorry for? Eric wasn't really giving me much to go on by just standing there, staring at the bed.

"You've been cleaning then?" he asked, obviously going for a complete change of subject, in lieu of an apology for being shitty. I guessed I could play along. "Yep" I said. "I think the shower looks better now."

"Uh-huh." Eric sounded as though he wasn't really listening. "And then my mother showed up? Pamela?" He turned to face me. "You're sure it was her?" he asked, and he looked really perplexed by it all.

I picked up the card she'd left me from the dressing table. "She left this" I said. "And it was pretty unmistakeable. The, um, resemblance…" It was like treading on eggshells, I wasn't sure what to say.

"Mmm" Eric said. "That's interesting." I wasn't sure whether he sounded that interested or not. God I hated this.

"She wants you to call" I said, figuring I might as well just get it all out and let what happened, happened. "I said I'd let you know, but that it was up to you. I think she wants to hang out with Pam, mostly." Eric looked at me. "She was a bit, um, worried about the boys when they were thundering around."

"Yeah" Eric said. "Yeah, OK." He just stood there for a bit and didn't move. "I might, um…" he looked at me, and he looked pretty upset. "I might just go out. For a while. Maybe, um…take a drive." He looked indecisive about it all and not really sure what course of action to take.

"OK" I said. "Yeah, you do that. I think that's a good idea." I smiled at him in the chance it might help. It was pretty clear that Eric was troubled and I didn't think there was much I could do to make it better. He needed to work this out himself.

"Yeah" he said. "I might take the Corvette." And then he picked up the keys off the dressing table, gave me a quick hug and walked out of the room.

**Thanks for reading!**


	34. Chapter 34

**A/N Right, I have been allowed off the couch long enough to post this. The toddler likes to sing made-up songs into her little plastic microphone, but she needs an audience for when she finishes and takes the world's most elaborate bows. It's nice to know I'm useful for something!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I was pretty much ready for this fucking trip to be over, I really fucking was. Every time I turned around something else came up. Some other secret came out of the woodwork to fucking bite me in the ass and remind me of just how fucking shitty my life was before I had Sookie and the kids.

I didn't want any more reminders. And her showing up, here, was just a big fucking reminder of all the time she hadn't shown up before. All those birthdays she'd missed…just, fucking everything. She knew where we were. She just didn't fucking care.

Why the fuck was she coming around now?

I felt jumpy and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I said to Sookie that I'd go for a drive and I watched for her reaction to that. It always made her nervous, if I left. And I knew why. And I couldn't fucking blame her.

But she didn't look that nervous this time. I liked to think that it was because she trusted me, rather than that she didn't want me in the fucking house and what I was seeing was just relief. So, fuck. I'd go.

Of course it was never that easy to get away. "Are you taking the Corvette?" Tray asked, as I tried to get out the door.

"Yep" I said, and his face lit up. "Can I come too?" he asked.

"Nope" I said, reaching for the doorknob and Tray's face fell. Fuck. I knew that feeling.

"Tomorrow" I said. "Tomorrow I'll take you out."

Tray sighed. "OK" he said, and I made it out the door and to the garage. I got in the Corvette, thankful that the van had been left on the fucking street, and I drove. I wasn't really sure where I was going, I just drove.

Driving was better than thinking. Thinking fucking sucked. And feeling was even worse.

I didn't know how I felt. About any of this.

I'd waited for it for so long. And I'd thought it would feel good, when she came back. When she finally fucking realised she'd been wrong and that she really did want me. And I'd thought…fuck, I'd thought that if Dad wasn't around maybe she'd want me. If she didn't want him then maybe she'd want me.

But she wanted Pam. She'd always wanted a Pam. And I'd been fucking stupid enough to finally give her one.

We really should have fucking called her Isabella. Or Potato. Or Lula. Or anything else but that.

It seemed like a fucking good idea at the time. When I thought I was going to lose Sookie too. It seemed like a really good idea to show she didn't mean anything to me anymore, that I could be the bigger person, forgive her for going, for not caring, for never caring. For being the shittiest mom in the world.

But now I realised all I'd done is give her everything she ever wanted. Fuck.

I drove for a while and I ended up in the parking lot of the bar Dad used to like the best. Yeah, sitting out here, waiting for him, that was a fucking shitty time.

But at least he took me places and didn't just run off.

Fuck, why couldn't I just have one fucking normal parent? Why were they both so fucking toxic? What the fuck had I done to deserve that?

I knew there wasn't an answer to that, and I knew that if there was an answer that it was probably 'nothing', but fuck, it didn't make it feel any better.

I'd just wanted her to say she was sorry. And she hadn't even stuck around to do that.

I sighed, and switched off the engine. Looked at the sign over the door of the bar. Wondered how much their profits were down these days. Probably quite a fucking lot.

I reached in my pocket and took out the card Sookie had given me. The one she'd left. Well, she'd married that guy, I guessed. That was his name she was using now. _Pam's Pampering_.

Was it just me, or did that fucking sound like it was somewhere you'd take poodles?

I looked at it, and the more I looked at it, the more ridiculous it fucking seemed. It sounded like a fucking pet salon. Fuck, I wished Ivan was here, she could have worried about his fucking cuticles.

I laughed. And I wished Sookie was here because I was pretty sure it would fucking make her laugh too. And then I started the engine again, and drove back to the house.

"Can we go out now?" Tray asked as I walked in the door. I wondered whether he'd been stationed here, in the hallway, the whole fucking time I was gone.

"Uh…tomorrow buddy" I reminded him. "Tomorrow I don't have anything else on."

"Cool" he said, and he ran off. I could hear Sookie calling the kids to dinner, and Sam passed me in the hallway. "It's lasagne" he announced.

"Um…I'll be there shortly" I said, and I went to the bathroom to wash up. When I joined the rest of the family at the table it was noisy and Tray and Sam were arguing over who had the most food on their plate.

"Tray, you won't be allowed to sit on that stool if you're just going to spend the time kicking Sam in the back" Sookie said to him.

"What?" Tray asked, trying to look innocent.

"You heard" I warned him, as I tried to get into my own seat. Fuck, we were packed in pretty tightly around this table. The sooner we got home the better.

Sookie gave me a good once-over and then handed me a plate, before sitting down with her own dinner.

"Pam! Your elbow is in my way!" Felicia complained.

"No it's not" Pam said. "I need to eat too!"

"Well, fucking eat then" I said to them. Everyone quietened down, and did just that. Sookie kept glancing at me during dinner, but didn't say anything, or ask any questions, and it wasn't until the kids had left the table to go and watch TV that I got to talk to her.

"So…?" she asked, as she tried to jam more plates into the dishwasher.

"Um. I'll call her" I said.

"Oh. OK. Yeah. Probably it would be the nice thing to do. We could have her over? I could um…well, I could do roast lamb. Do you think?"

"No" I said. "No I think I'll just tell her we don't want to see her."

"Oh" Sookie said. "Oh. Well, if you're sure? I mean, we're not going to be around again. For a while. Are we?" Sookie looked at me waiting to see what I'd say.

"No. We're not. And I think it's best if we just…fuck. I don't want to see her." I'd thought about it and I just couldn't bring myself to want it. Not anymore.

Sookie considered that statement. "Are you sure?" she asked, again. "You don't think you'll regret it?"

I shook my head. "I just can't imagine it ending well" I said. "I'm going to call her now."

Sookie just nodded, like she was agreeing with me which spoke fucking volumes about how that woman had behaved when she'd been here. "OK" she said.

"And I'm going to tell her the name sucks" I said.

Sookie looked at me. "Don't say that around Pam!" she whispered. "She's already annoyed that she didn't get the name first."

"Oh. No. The salon. The salon has a stupid name. _Pam's Pampering_? Sounds like there should be a poodle involved." I watched Sookie as she pressed her lips together in that way she did when she was trying not to laugh. And then she gave up and giggled.

"You're right" she said. "And it's a chain of poodle parlours, I'll have you know. She was quite clear about that, it wasn't just one, it was a whole bloody chain."

"Exactly, Sookie. Someone has to tell her."

I walked into the bedroom and dialled the number. I'd felt quite good when Sookie had been laughing at my joke about the name, but now. Now I felt fucking sick.

"Hello?" she answered.

"It's Eric" I replied and there was a moment of silence. "Oh. You called!" she said, and her voice sounded completely different. Happier, lighter. Was she really that thrilled at the prospect of getting to know us, or was it all an act? Was I really going to tell her she couldn't come and see her grandchildren?

Yes I fucking was.

"You were here. Today" I said, feeling like a dumbass as I said it. She knew she was, and she must have known I knew or else why the fuck was I calling her?

But I was stalling. I wanted to see what she'd say.

"Yes. It was lovely to meet, um. Sookie? And the children. The children were lovely." She sounded warm. She sounded sincere. I wished I could see her face.

"I wasn't here" I said, wondering when the fuck I was going to stop stating the fucking obvious.

"No" she said. "I was…it was a shame. You're, um…" She didn't seem to know what I was. It wasn't fucking surprising really. She'd missed thirty years of my life.

"I'm me" I said. "I'm always me. You just don't know who that is."

"No, well, of course with Stan around it was very difficult" she said, slightly recovering her composure.

"How?" I asked, curious as to what she'd say. I knew my father was fucking difficult, everything around here was fucking difficult when he was involved. But why did I have to live with it if she'd upped and fucking left?

"Well…" she said, "He drank, of course, and then he was mean. He said horrible things to me, said no one else would ever want me." She laughed. "He hated my cooking. Hated my taste in furnishings, always said that if he wanted to live in a house with flowers on every surface he would have been a bumblebee."

"He was fucking mean to everyone" I said. He'd been fucking brutal to me sometimes.

"It's very difficult to live with though" she said.

"I know." There was a long moment of silence.

"We just weren't suited Eric" she said in the end.

"Who? You and Dad, or me and you?"

"I…you have no idea what it was like for me, Eric. I had no family close by, no job, nothing to do all day and then he'd come home and start throwing his weight around. It was awful."

"Yep" I said. "It was awful." I wasn't sure what I'd expected, but it was something more than this. She wasn't telling me anything I didn't know, anything I hadn't lived through myself. I had thought I'd maybe feel more sympathy, or that we could commiserate with each other, or that she'd have some kind of story that made me feel better about being left behind. But she didn't.

"But you did OK" she said. "You have all those kids now."

"Uh-huh" I agreed.

"And Pam is quite a lovely little thing, isn't she?"

I paused for a moment and thought about that statement. "She's what you always wanted" I said.

"She's my grand-daughter" she said. "I didn't know she existed until just now…"

"You never asked me" I said, quietly. "You just had to ask me."

"How, Eric? How could I do that? You'd moved away, you're using that surname. How was I supposed to find you?"

"You were supposed to try, that's what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to try. You never even tried." I hadn't wanted to tell her she was a shitty mother, that wasn't what this was supposed to be about. I was just supposed to tell her to get lost. But I wanted her to say it. I wanted her to say she hadn't cared.

"Would you have welcomed me, Eric?" she asked softly.

"Once" I said. "Once, but not now. Now I don't need you. I have a family and you're not part of it."

I don't think that's what she'd been fucking expecting me to say. "I, uh…but…" she stammered. "But my grand-children. Surely I can get to know them?"

"Don't you mean grand-daughter?" I asked.

"All of them, Eric" she said, sounding insulted.

"No. Just Pam. I know it's Pam you want and it kills you, doesn't it? It fucking _kills_ you that I've got the one thing you always wanted, the one thing you couldn't have. That you fucking miscalculated so badly, that if you'd just kept me around you could have had her. Well you didn't. You missed your fucking chance and nothing's going to change that."

"Well, of course you'd say that, Eric. He probably poisoned you against me."

"He fucking loved you." I knew that now. That had been his secret; he'd driven away the woman he loved.

"I don't think that excuses how he treated me" she said.

"And what's your excuse then? For the way you treated me? No, don't fucking bother answering me. I can guess. You're a shitty person."

"How dare you? You say I don't know anything about you, well you don't know anything about me either. How dare you say that? You are just like him, you know that? You are just like Stan, using words like they're weapons, trying to belittle me and bring me down to your level. Well, that won't work on me, Eric. Stan couldn't do it, and I won't let you do it either."

"You've shown me one thing. I'd rather be like him than like you and I fucking hated him."

"Do you hate me?"

I thought about that for a moment. "No…I think I used to. But not now. Mostly now I just pity you."

"You don't call me Mom. I wish you would." She almost sounded seductive when she said it, like she was trying to entice me to do…what? Tell her she was my mother? That I forgave her? That we could wind the clock back 31 years and pretend it had never happened now Dad wasn't around to tell us what stupid assholes we were?

"No" I said. "I don't. I don't have a mother. Never really have. Dad was always right about that at least, that you'd left us both because you didn't love us. It hurt him, you know? It fucking hurt him that you wouldn't go and see him the hospital."

"I did" she said, sounding indignant. "Briefly."

"So you aren't too hard to find these days, are you?" I asked. I always fucking wondered where she'd been.

"Oh, Stan mostly knew where I was. At least after a while. And I did have that restraining order at one time, when he wanted to make my life…difficult."

Well that was fucking news. My father the fucking stalker. Excellent fucking gene-pool I came from.

"You should have stayed" I said to her, feeling like the parent in the situation. "You should have stayed for his sake, and not fucking cared about yourself so much. It was the decent fucking thing to do."

"And he was so decent to me, wasn't he Eric? What was there to say, anyway? We'd said it all before, so many times. I wasn't going to sit there and have him tell me how hurt he was and what a mistake I'd made. The mistake wasn't leaving him, it was marrying him."

"And having me. Clearly having me upset your perfect little existence too."

"I was right" she said, her voice had now lost the seductive edge it had had earlier and it was bordering on shrill. "I was right to leave you with him. I couldn't deal with a boy, and this is why. You all think you own the world."

"What? Because I won't toe the line? Because I don't think the sun shines out of your fucking ass? That's not how the world fucking works; I would have thought you would have figured that out by now."

"I don't know what you hope to achieve with this, Eric. I don't know what you think you're going to gain from it. What are you going to tell those children? You told their grandmother to get lost because you were still upset I wasn't around? I _told_ you he drove me away, I don't know what else I have to do. You talk about _me_ having a big ego, well it's pretty obvious you want me to come crawling to you, begging to be in their lives. Well I won't. I won't demean myself just so you can get some kind of revenge on me. I wasn't the bad guy."

"No, well you left me with the bad guy. What makes you think I'd let my kids anywhere near a woman who can't look after one kid, huh? So goodbye, good luck, and you can't fucking have Pam, she's mine."

I disconnected the call before she could think up anything else to say. And I just stood there, breathing hard like I'd just run a fucking marathon. I thought I'd feel better, thought I'd feel some kind of fucking closure. Thought maybe I'd have regrets for telling her to fuck off.

But I didn't have any of that. I felt…OK. I didn't think I'd done the wrong thing. Until I looked at the doorway and saw the big blue eyes looking at me like I was a fucking traitor.

"Leesh…" I said, but she'd gone down the hallway.

"What's up with her?" Sam asked, as I walked in the direction Felicia had gone.

"She's um…she's OK" I said. I hoped she was OK. I wondered what the fuck she'd heard, and what had upset her and it killed me that it might have been me.

"Leesh?" I said, as I stuck my head around the door of the bedroom she was sharing with Pam. Felicia was lying on the bed, about to put her ear-buds in her ears. "What?" she said, looking up at me.

"Are you OK?" I asked, sitting on the bed.

"Yes" she said sharply. "So you can leave."

"I don't think you are" I said. It was pretty clear she was preparing to shut down and keep us all out and that look she'd given me, that had been unmistakeable. I really wasn't her fucking favourite person about now.

"You don't know everything" Felicia said, haughtily.

"I know you" I said.

"Whatever!" Felicia replied, rolling her eyes, and fiddling with her iPod.

"Maybe I'll just sit here for a while" I said, moving so I was leaning against the pillows at the top of the bed, right next to Felicia.

She gave me a once-over. "You take up nearly as much room as Pam" she said.

"I think she'd say the same thing about you. You do like to spread out in your sleep" I pointed out. That only got me an eye-roll and another "Whatever!" from Felicia.

"So, we're just hanging out?" I asked.

"Nope" Felicia said. "I'm hanging out because the TV out there is stupid. You're just…just…well, I don't know what you're doing, but it's annoying." She looked at me as though I was the one with the problem.

"You sound like your mother" I said. She did sometimes, Amelia did too. It was fucking frightening.

"Whatever!" Felicia half-screamed. And then she balled her fists in frustration and a big, fat tear ran down her cheek. Fuck, that wasn't good.

"Leesh…" I said, and I reached out, but she pushed me away. "You don't want me!" she said. "She didn't want me, you don't want me. I'm not yours, it's all just pretend. I'm the _part_ –sister, aren't I? I'm not anything!" Now she was crying properly and it was just…fuck, it was heart-breaking. I knew how she felt and I hated that this had happened because of me, because of that woman, because of what she'd overheard me say. It was so far from the truth.

"Oh, Leesh. You're definitely mine."

"No I'm not" she said, sniffing loudly. "It's just a name and a name doesn't mean anything. It's not like blood, is it? Is it?" She was red-faced and angry and jutted out her chin as she dared me to answer her. Fuck, she was the spitting image of Sookie sometimes.

"You look like your mother" I said to her.

"Yeah. So? I don't look like you. Not like _Pam_ does. And Tray. And Sam. They're all like you, aren't they? "

"Yep. But you look like Sookie. And I love her, remember? I noticed you looked like her the first time I saw you. You were just this baby with big, blue eyes who kept staring at me, when she wasn't making this horrific shrieking sound." Fuck that had been hard to take when I'd had a hang-over.

Felicia looked mildly interested. "How old was I?" she asked.

"Um…fuck. You'd have to ask your mom for the specifics. Eight months, I think? I had no way of knowing. You were the first baby I'd ever been around." Felicia looked straight ahead and considered that fact. "You were the first baby I ever held. You were crying, in the night…I think you might have been teething. And I picked you up. And then I didn't have a fuck what to do with you." I laughed at that. Fuck, it was hard to remember now. It had been like picking up an alien creature or something. She'd just looked at me, waiting to see if I knew what to do next. Like it was some kind of test.

"So what did you do?" Felicia asked. "Did you get Mum?"

"No. No, she came in afterwards. Probably scared I'd break you or something, but no. I held you. And you were so tiny, and I was kind of scared I'd drop you, or something. But I didn't. And it felt OK. Holding you. It felt OK."

Felicia sighed. "I don't remember any of this."

"No" I said. "But, luckily, I do. You learned to crawl not long afterwards, just to annoy Amelia I think. And then you ate a shoe…"

"I ate a shoe?" she asked.

"Yeah. A Barbie shoe. It was Amelia's. It was just the three of us and I thought you might die on me and Sookie would hate me forever and I panicked and rang the nurse who told me you'd poop it out. Fuck that was scary."

"Really? 'Cos you weren't scared when Tray ate that Lego?"

"No. Well I'd been through it before, by then. You were my first baby for everything, Leesh. The first one that peed on me…"

"The boys used to pee on you! I've never peed on anyone!" Felicia said vehemently.

"Yeah, you have" I said. "It was me. And you pooped through your clothes and all over the comforter once when you got your diaper off. You wouldn't sit still to eat and I had to figure out how to get your arms to stay at your sides…"

"The tea-towel? That we're not supposed to tell Mum about? But that was for the boys."

"And you. You had the prototype of that one."

"Huh" Felicia said, considering what I'd said.

"We did everything first, you and I" I said to her. "All the shitty stuff…literally shitty stuff. And all the good stuff too. When you stopped shrieking you giggled, a lot. You giggled all the time, like everything I did was fucking funny. You used to drool on everything, and put my phone in your mouth like it was a chew toy. You chewed my sock…"

"Sockie."

"Yeah. And then you'd follow me around and offer it to me, like we could share it. You followed me around a lot, and you always wanted to be thrown in the air. You taught me that kids are pretty indestructible, and that even when they want to run around in the middle of the fucking night when they really should be sleeping, it's still nice when they want to come and snuggle. Just maybe not when they want to sit on your head to do it. It's fucking scary waking up with your face covered with diaper."

Felicia looked at me. "That was me? All of that? That was all me?"

"Yep. That was all you. And more."

"Huh."

"So, do you see?" I asked.

"See what?"

"See that if it wasn't for you, there wouldn't have been any other kids."

Felicia snorted. "Because you got to practice on me and figure out I wouldn't break?"

I reached over and took her hand. "Because you loved me back, Leesh. Because it didn't matter what I'd done in the past, you loved me for who I was in that moment. I'd never had that before, not really. It was so…simple, but so wonderful all the same."

Felicia looked a bit glassy-eyed. She looked at the comforter and considered that. "Because of her?" she asked quietly. "That woman…your mum?"

"Yeah" I said. "For a whole of lot of reasons, some of them of my own making. I hadn't had that before, and I got it with you. If I hadn't then there wouldn't be any other kids. It took all of you, it took you and Amelia and Sookie to show me that. And I loved you all for it, so much. It's a really special thing and it's bigger than blood or a name or any of that other bullshit. That doesn't mean fucking anything; I can tell you that now from experience."

"You're my dad" Felicia said, and she turned to give me a hug.

"I am" I agreed, and we stayed like that for a while until Felicia got restless and wanted to go and see what the boys were doing without her.

I found Sookie in the kitchen folding laundry. "It doesn't matter where we go" she muttered. "This is always the same." And then she looked at me. "What was up with Felicia? Pam reported that she was upset."

I sat down at the table. "She overheard the conversation I had. Thought I didn't want her."

"How'd that happen?" Sookie asked, still folding clothes and piling them up.

"I told my mother she couldn't have Pam, that Pam's mine, and Felicia misunderstood. But they're all mine. And I don't want her coming around here and fucking upsetting them. She's just…fuck. She's just fucking trouble. I think maybe Dad was right…in a way. We're better off without her." I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward and Sookie moved around to put her hands on my shoulders. She started rubbing, gently. That was nice. I leaned my head back so it was resting against her.

"So you don't regret it? Telling her to go jump?" she asked.

"Nope" I said. "I can't change the past, and neither can she. It's too late, and I think it was too late the moment she left. She's just…fuck. She said she wasn't cut out to be a mother and I think she's right, but I don't see how she can turn around now and say she wants to be a grandmother."

"It's like the Little Red Hen" Sookie said, which was kind of bizarre. "What?" I asked.

"Oh, you know the story. No one helps her make the bread and they all want to eat it. You have to put the work in etcetera, if you want to get anything."

"Yeah" I said, as Sookie's hands rubbed my neck. "I guess."

We stayed quiet for a while and then I thought of something that I wanted to tell Sookie. One last secret to get out. I felt like I'd been stripped bare on this trip and while it was fucking painful, it felt good too. And now that Sookie had seen her, seen my mother and knew what it was that had made her so disappointed in me; she might as well know this too.

"My name" I said. "It wasn't just something I picked out."

"Oh" Sookie said, trying to sound casual. Her hands kept working though.

"Yeah. When I was about…five? Around then. My mother's aunt came to visit one day. My grandmother, who was also a Pamela, had died when my mother was quite young and the aunt had helped raise her. So she drove up for the day and brought her father, my great-grandfather with her. He was the biggest person I think I'd ever seen, and also the quietest. He didn't say anything, just sat there, drinking coffee while my mother and her aunt caught up on all the gossip. I just played in the corner, and watched him. Once, he winked at me, but he still didn't say anything. He didn't say anything at all until they were leaving, and then he held out his hand so I could shake it and he said "Nice to meet you, Eric. It's good to have another man in the family." And then he left, and I never saw him again. But it was his name. Northman was his name. That's…that's why I picked it."

I couldn't see Sookie's face, but she was still rubbing my shoulders. After a while she said "So you knew then? You knew she wanted a girl?"

I sighed. "Probably. In some way I did. I knew she didn't really want me. I just…fuck. It's all so long ago now."

"It is" Sookie agreed.

"And I put it behind me, but this trip. Fuck, it's all come back and I feel so fucking bad for involving you all in my shitty fucking life."

"No" Sookie said. "It's not like that, and you know it's not." She sat down on the chair next to me and I turned to look at her. "It's all…I don't know. Part of you. I promised, didn't I? To take the good with the bad. And this is some of the bad, but it's not the worst. And we're here for you, because that's what families do."

"Yeah" I said. "It is." Sookie took my hand. "It's OK, really. We'll be home soon."

"Yep" I agreed. "We will."

And then Sookie looked like she remembered something. "And I think I might have found a buyer for the house."

"Really?" I asked. "Who?"

"Some woman who came to the door. She's coming back at 5 o'clock tomorrow."

"It's not my mother, is it?" I asked.

"No, I had more than one surprise visitor today. It always happens when the house is a mess!"

"The bathroom does look better though" I said. "The mould's gone."

"Mmm, some of the flowers went off the tiles too, but I don't think that's a bad thing."

"No" I agreed. "I don't think so either."

We looked at each other for a moment. "Ready to face getting them all into bed?" Sookie asked.

"I guess" I said. "Although I thought this would get easier as they got older."

"Yeah. They've just thought of better excuses."

"Yep" I said, and I stood up. "Thank you" I said to Sookie.

"What for?" she asked.

"Everything" I said. "Just…everything." And it was everything. Without her, and my kids I'd be nothing. Just the collateral damage in a fucking toxic relationship between two people who couldn't see past their own problems.

"Oh, you're welcome. So does that mean you're telling the boys the PlayStation's getting switched off now?" she asked, smiling at me.

"Fuck. OK then." I started to walk out of the kitchen.

"Eric" Sookie called after me, and I turned as I reached the door. "I do like it" she said. "The name. It was a good pick."

"Thanks" I said, and then I walked out of the kitchen.

**Thanks for reading!**


	35. Chapter 35

**A/N OK, so I had a breather after the emotional last couple of chapters and then this got delayed due to my time in Migraine-ville with a small detour to Toilet Training City (yeah, that's a fun place to hang out, watch those puddles!). **

**I do want to say though, a big, big thank-you to everyone for all the lovely PMs and reviews I got after the last couple of chapters, even if I made you cry (and I'm sorry for that). It was really heart-warming to see just how much people liked the journey the characters are on and the fact we got to reminisce along with Eric over cute little Felicia. Bet he's glad she's past the stage of random floor-puddles now :)**

**So thank you all, it means a lot to me. I really do have some awesome readers :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. My world is drugged-up and kind of damp.**

SPOV

I watched Eric fairly carefully for the rest of the evening, but he seemed OK. There weren't any outward signs of distress, anyway. If there was anything still bubbling below the surface it was hard to tell. He was quite nicely distracted by the PlayStation, anyway, after he ended up playing with the boys rather than actually telling them to pack it up. I'm not sure how much they really appreciated their dad showing them how the games should be played, these days they were pretty adept at picking it all up by themselves, but they didn't tell him to butt out so I don't think Eric was any the wiser.

I went to check on Felicia. She was in the bedroom with Pam, explaining the problem with the sleeping arrangements. "So, you're this wide" she said, holding her hands a little way apart to demonstrate. "So you get that much of the bed."

"No, I get half the bed" Pam argued.

"But you're not even half a person yet, Pom-pom. So you get the space you need. Otherwise it's greedy."

Pam huffed at that. "One day" she said. "I'll be as big as Daddy."

Yeah, I didn't know how I was going to break that one to her. Going by growth charts and progress to date, Pam was going to be lucky to be as big as Felicia when they were adults. But I wasn't going to tell her that tonight, not when there were a few other pieces of bad news she was going to have to face on this trip. Like the fact her new-found grandmother wasn't coming back any time soon. God, I hoped she asked Eric about that one.

But I wasn't that lucky.

"Or as big as Nana Pamela" Pam said, and I had to force myself not to wince. I didn't know how that name would play out with Pamela, but she'd probably never hear it anyway.

Felicia gave her a funny look when she said that, and then her eyes flicked to me. "I don't see why I have to go to bed this early just because I'm sharing with the baby."

I sighed. "You guys have all sat up late enough as it is. It's bedtime." In the background Pam said "Not a baby", but she didn't have a lot of conviction about it. It was a fine line, really. While you didn't want to be branded too babyish, she wasn't above pulling out the 'I'm too little' card occasionally when it suited. In Pam's experience it paid to not stick too closely to one point of view in case someone called you up on it.

She'd clearly been paying way too much attention to Eric in all the years she spent serving him cups of pretend-tea.

"So is Nana Pamela coming back tomorrow?" Pam asked.

"I thought you were going to see Miriam?" I asked in return, trying to dodge the question.

"Well…I am" Pam said, nodding. "But I could see Nana Pamela too…or…or she could come as well. I think she'd like to watch me sew something. She said she liked clothes. And pink. Maybe I could have some of Miriam's pink fabric?" Pam looked thoughtful.

I was pondering how to get out of this one when Felicia blurted out "She's not coming back."

"She's not?" Pam asked. "But she liked me."

I opened my mouth to say something about it not really having anything to do with Pam herself when, once again, Felicia pipped me at the post. "But she doesn't like Daddy" Felicia said.

"She doesn't?" Pam asked. "But he looks like her." OK, Pam had picked up a few things from Pamela too then, one of them being that she liked the people who looked like her. I had a vision of Pamela and Pam as some of those fancy Russian dolls which Pam had liked in Sacramento.

"He's a boy" Felicia explained. "I don't think she likes boys." I realised that Felicia was actually quite switched on and I really should tear my brain away from images of dolls that fit inside each other and back to what we were all talking about.

"I don't like stinky boys. But Daddy's not a boy" Pam said confidently.

"Well he was once" I said, trying to regain a foothold into the conversation.

"So she doesn't like him" Felicia added, and I tried to give her a look to get her to hush up, but she ignored me. "Because she only knew him when he was little."

Pam turned to Felicia. "Oh. So, she really doesn't like Daddy? Does Daddy know? Do we have to tell him?"

"Um…no, I think he knows…" I said. "We don't have to say anything to him. Possibly better if we don't."

"Well if she doesn't like Daddy, I don't like her. Like I don't like Mr Furnan because he's mean to Daddy."

"Mmm" I said, while thinking that Daddy might have had something to do with all the yelling that had gone on during that encounter.

Pam sighed. "But I did like having a nana" Pam said. "You've got a nana" she said to Felicia.

Felicia shrugged. "Well…you get to share her. She likes you, anyway."

Pam looked thoughtful. "Does she like Daddy?" she asked Felicia.

That was going to be interesting. Felicia looked a little bit worried and was clearly searching for an answer for that one.

"She doesn't dislike him" I said, which was about the kindest thing I could say on that subject without lying outright.

"Oh!" Felicia said, as she thought of something. "She call's him Mum's lover, remember? So she must like him." Felicia looked to me for confirmation. I wondered if it was too much to hope that Lorena would learn to keep her big mouth shut at her age.

"Like that book? Amelia's reading?" Pam asked.

"What book?" Felicia asked. I guessed she didn't keep track of everything going on around here after all.

"That one she had today. That was called, um…_Destiny's Forbidden Lover_…or something?"

Felicia shrugged. "Sounds kinda lame" she said. "Amelia reads some weird books."

Pam nodded. "She does. It's all kissing and stuff. That's just yucky really. I like books about girls. Where they go out and have adventures. And I like Nana Lorena."

"Yep, and she wants you to come over and knit with her" Felicia said.

"Yeah…" Pam mused. "I don't think Nana Pamela knits, do you?"

"No" Felicia said. "I don't think she has any cardis."

"I could knit you a new cardi!" Pam offered brightly. "If I do that, can I have more of the bed?"

Felicia looked horrified. "I like the one I have" she said. "Plus, you'd make it pink."

"Well, pink and silver maybe?" Pam asked. Felicia shook her head. "No" she said. "And you only get half the bed."

Pam's face lit up, "I get half?" she said, and Felicia frowned as she realised her mistake.

"Yeah, but your half is smaller than my half because you're smaller than me. OK?" Felicia said.

"Yeah, OK" Pam said happily.

"Right, brush your teeth and then into bed" I said, and then we said our goodnights and I left them.

I checked on Amelia next and she seemed to be fairly happy with her pile of romance books. "You are going to do your reading for school, aren't you?" I asked her, but she waved me off. "I'm just reading" she said. "It _is _the holidays, Mum."

"Yeah" I agreed, "It is." Although I did wonder when I got a holiday. After all, that washing pile just seemed to follow me from country to country. Not to mention the sad little faces who always expected me to feed them.

I just about bumped into Eric in the hall after I left Amelia. He was trying to get Sam and Tray to go to bed. "Just fucking get back there, Tray" he said, as Tray ran past us and yelled "'Night, Mum" to me.

Eric turned around to make sure Tray did head into the bedroom and get into bed and I heard Sam shout, "Get your foot off me!", and then there was a thud and Eric saying they needed to "…find a way to fucking deal with it and go to sleep." He sounded like himself, I reasoned. So maybe he was OK?

When he came back out from their room, I stuck my head in to say goodnight, and, as I left I could hear Sam saying. "Oh God, Tray. That fucking stinks!", while Tray giggled. Yeah, they'd figured out a way to deal with each other.

Eric meanwhile went into the bedroom we were using and busied himself by sitting on the bed and flicking through the _Women's Weekly_ I'd bought to read on the plane. After a minute or so he started commenting on the cooking section. "This hotpot looks OK" Eric said, which was generally meant to be code for 'please make this for dinner one night'. It wasn't particularly good code, of course, because it was pretty clear just what he was getting at.

"Well, maybe when we get home, and the weather is colder again. Here, it's hot and I'm thinking about salad for dinner tomorrow night." Eric looked the most distraught I'd seen him all evening, which was probably a good sign. Or he was hiding the fall-out from his mum's visit and the phone call really, really well. I wanted to know which it was, but I didn't really fancy making Eric submit to my questioning about now.

"Really?" he said. "I don't know how that will play with Tray…"

"Yeah" I agreed. "Tray would be the problem with that."

"Mmm. Getting him to eat veges is almost like getting them to turn that fucking PlayStation off."

"Yep" I agreed. "It's not easy."

"No" Eric said, shaking his head and pretending he couldn't see me smiling.

"I was just glad that Pam eventually went to bed" I said. "She's far too excited about the fact she'll get to see Miriam tomorrow. She's fallen hard."

"What, Pam has?" Eric asked.

"Yeah, in that way little girls do. You remember what Amelia was like? The new best friend is always the bestest best friend ever. So…where are we putting your underwear?" I was still dealing with the washing. It was really never-ending.

Eric shrugged. "On top of the suitcase?" he suggested.

"Um…" I said, trying to be diplomatic. There was already a pile of stuff on top of Eric's suitcase. "Maybe I'll put it on the dressing table" I said. Eric watched me do it. I could tell he still felt odd about occupying this room and I didn't want to suggest using any of the drawers although at some point we were going to have to empty those out. We were going to have to clear everything out. It was not going to be a pleasant task.

"Pam, um…she asked about seeing your mother again" I said, testing the waters on that subject. I tensed as I turned around to look at Eric.

"Mmm?" he said, very casually and not really looking up from the article he was reading about some TV presenter's miracle twins conceived via IVF.

"I said it was unlikely. Felicia said it wasn't happening because she didn't like you…"

"Felicia doesn't like me?" Eric asked.

"No, um. Felicia thought, um…well, that your mother doesn't like you, so, um, now Pam doesn't like her. And they've agreed to share Lorena, but the negotiations about the bed are still on-going. But at least they haven't quite moved on to stinking the other one out of the room yet." I watched Eric's reaction but he didn't give much away, his eyes flicking back to the magazine as he said "Uh-huh" to all of that.

I gave up and went to the bathroom to get ready for bed, and, when I came out, Eric put the magazine down and went in. When he emerged he got under the covers with me and I put my head on his chest and just listened to his heartbeat. After everything that had happened today, I don't think either of us wanted to talk much, but it was nice listening to his heart all the same.

"I like you" I whispered, just as I was starting to feel pleasantly drowsy.

"And really Sookie, that's all that fucking matters" Eric added.

EPOV

I knew that Sookie was watching me to see what would happen, how I would react to telling my mother she could just fuck off right out of our lives. And I wanted to say that it would be OK, but I couldn't. I didn't really know myself. There was nothing I could do but just keep moving forward with everything. Move forward and eventually we could go home and pretend this was all just a nightmare.

Of course the next morning I felt like I was moving constantly. Tray insisted on his drive in the Corvette, so I took him out and we drove around looking at the places I used to go and where I went to school. Tray, though, was mostly interested in the car. "So, did your dad get this when it was new?" he asked.

"Yep" I said. "It's older than me."

"So, it's like a classic car, then?"

"I guess" I said.

"Is it worth a lot of money?" Tray asked.

"Only if someone wants to give us a lot of money for it" I pointed out. Tray looked aghast. "But we're not selling it, are we Dad?"

"It won't fit in a suitcase, Tray."

"But…"

"Just let's enjoy it while we have it, OK?"

The rest of the drive was silent as Tray wound down the window and hung his head out the car. At least he got the message about enjoying it.

Sam's turn was next, so I didn't spend much time in the house during the changeover of kids, just long enough to hear Sookie say "Amelia! Come and help with the curtains!" Yeah, fuck. No wonder the boys wanted to get out for a bit. It probably wasn't the most fun they'd ever had during a school vacation.

By the time I got back with Sam, Sookie and Amelia were stuffing curtains into the washing machine and the house looked incredibly different. All the curtains in the bedrooms were down and every single window was open. Who knew there were that many fucking windows in the place?

"Trying to get some fresh air through the house" Sookie explained. "Plus, it's really hot."

"Yeah" I said. "It is." Sookie picked up the vacuum cleaner and started down the hall. "And of course, now I can see all the dust" she said.

"Thank-you" I called after her, and she gave me a wave over her shoulder.

Next up I had to take Pam in the Corvette. Well, Pam, Mr Fluffy, one of the Barbies and the Xena figurine. "It's a pretty red colour" she said, looking at the outside of the car.

"Yep" I agreed.

"But Tray says you don't want to keep it?" she asked, as she sat in the passenger seat next to me. I wasn't sure if she was going to be able to see much, she was kind of tiny.

"We can't" I explained. "I'm not shipping it back to New Zealand."

Pam sighed. "I'll be sad to go home" she said. Well, she was about the only one. Everyone else was pretty much over being in the States.

Felicia had a turn in the car and pronounced it 'kind of bumpy, like the tyres aren't really that good and the engine sounds funny', and Amelia declined outright as somehow Sookie had convinced her that if she pulled everything out of the closet in the room she was sleeping in she might find some more of those books she'd been reading.

"So…you like those books?" I asked her, staring at one of the covers. They looked like some of the shit I'd seen Sookie read. I hoped these ones had less porn in them.

"They're OK" she said, shrugging.

"Does anyone sparkle in them?"

"Ha ha. It's Pam that likes sparkly things. I just like the characters, and the plot and finding out, you know, whether they're actually going to be together in the end."

"I think it's a given, Ames" I said to her.

"Some of them are really good stories" she said, and I really fucking hoped that wasn't code for porn. But then I saw her pull a box out of the closet and realised she was about to discover actual porn.

"Give me that, I'll put it in the trash" I said to Amelia, walking over to reach for the box.

"It's not books?" she asked, trying to peer inside. I took it out of her hands and kept it just above her head.

"Nope" I said. "It's just…trash."

Amelia sighed. "I don't think there's anything good in here…oh, hang on…"

"I'll just leave you to it" I said, as Amelia delved deeper to pull out something that was far too small to be of any concern to me.

"OK" she replied, with her head still in the closet.

I carried the box into the hallway where Sookie stepped in front of me as she exited the room the boys were staying in. "Were you helping Amelia clear stuff out?" she asked.

"Um…yeah."

"OK, well don't do too much of that today because we've got that buyer coming and I don't want stuff all over the place. I don't want to start junking things until we have one of those big bins to put stuff in, big enough we can put the chair in it too. And then…I don't know, do you guys have somewhere like the Salvation Army that'll come and collect stuff you donate? And, um…oh! You'll have to decide what, if anything, we're shipping home." Sookie looked at me expectantly.

"OK" I agreed. Fuck, that seemed like a lot of shit we still had to do. I was thinking we were almost done but that was going to take days.

"Still, the place is at least looking cleaner, don't you think?" Sookie asked.

"Yep" I said. "I do."

I figured if we were hiring a dumpster then I could get rid of it all then, so I pushed the box under the bed in Dad's room. It was still a bit odd thinking of it like that, when it was never going to be his room again.

And technically this was now my house. That was a fucking weird thought.

I had a moment were I suddenly realised that if I wanted to burn the place, I could, because it was mine. I mean, as long as I didn't kill anyone or try to claim on the insurance I'd be OK.

Although the fire brigade were still kind of pissed at me after the chair, so it probably wasn't a good idea, no matter how much it appealed.

No, I'd have to go with Sookie's plan to sell it to whoever the fuck was turning up this afternoon.

SPOV

I had a nice productive day and actually managed to get the bulk of the house clean, as well as the curtains washed. Those things had seen better days and I was a bit worried they weren't going to survive the trip through the washing machine, but they did. Just.

Everyone was getting a bit tetchy with hanging around the house though. Pam wasn't too bad, as she got to escape next door to go and see Miriam, and at least the boys were mostly content in the back yard running around with Miriam's brother. Amelia was OK as long as I confined her to the back bedroom and she managed to unearth some costume jewellery which she added to stack of romance novels. Yeah, she was coming out of this with a pile of new treasures.

It was Felicia who was really struggling. Too old to want to play with Pam or the boys, and not yet old enough to be interested in the same things Amelia was, she mostly hung around looking annoyed. In desperation I sent her and Eric to the supermarket for more supplies knowing that I wouldn't get everything I'd specified on the list, but at least it gave the pair of them something to do.

EPOV

I didn't really want to go grocery shopping with Felicia. I didn't really want to go grocery shopping full fucking stop. I seemed to be doing it a lot since Sookie and the kids had arrived and I was really fucking over it. I had suggested to Sookie that we just order pizza for dinner, but she'd said that was great for one meal, but what about the snacks everyone kept clamouring for and breakfast the next morning?

I got the impression leftover pizza was not the correct answer to that question. So I told Felicia to put her shoes on and we drove off in my rental car with Sookie's shopping list in tow. Fuck, I hoped this one made sense.

I'd wondered if I was taking Felicia with me because Sookie was still worried about her after the previous day, but I figured out it was just she was the one struggling to occupy herself. Pam had a friend, Sam and Tray had each other, Amelia had the treasure trove of the back bedroom, minus, thank fuck, the porn, but Felicia just had, well, me.

"This trip is sooo boooring" she huffed, putting her feet on the dashboard. I contemplated telling her to put them down, but fuck it. It wasn't my car.

"Well, I don't think it was meant to be a vacation" I said, as I turned into the supermarket parking lot.

Felicia sighed, loudly. "But it's the school holidays" she whined. "And everyone else will be, you know, doing stuff. And I'm not there."

"Who?" I asked, but Felicia just shrugged. She had a lot of friends, but didn't like to talk about them. Not like Amelia. It wasn't that she was hiding anything, well, I fucking hoped she wasn't. But she just didn't seem to be interested in having us all knowing exactly what she did every minute of the day.

"Well, come on. Let's get this fucking done" I said, as I parked and undid my seatbelt.

"Yeah, but you're not supposed to fucking swear around me, you know that, eh?" Felicia said with a smile, as she undid her own seatbelt.

"Felicia, that horse fucking bolted years ago. Just don't tell your mother, she still clings to some vain hope she has that I'll change."

Felicia snorted as she opened her door. "Yeah, like that'll happen."

Shopping with Felicia was different to shopping with Pam. For one thing, Felicia was a lot less bossy about the whole enterprise, but a fuck-load less help when it came to deciphering what Sookie wanted. "Do you think we need more milk than that?" I asked at one point, and all I got was a shrug and a sigh. I wasn't sure what would cheer Felicia up, I was thinking about offering a lollipop, but maybe she was too old.

"Do you want a lollipop?" I offered.

"No!" Felicia said, looking a bit shocked. "I'm _eleven_ you know."

"Yeah, I know" I said, as we carried on down the aisle.

"Just because you remember when I was a baby, it doesn't mean I'm still one" Felicia grumbled, and then she stopped in front of a display of tacky romance books. Fuck, I hope she didn't want to start reading them too. "Look" she said. "We should buy some more books for Amelia. That way she won't bother me."

"Mmm" I said. "I don't think she needs any more books."

"No" Felicia sighed. "They'll just rot her brain more than it already has. I don't even get why she likes them."

"Apparently, the plots are riveting" I explained, but Felicia didn't look convinced.

"Whatever" she said, shrugging, and starting to walk off. "It's all just boring, like everything here. Was it boring when you were a kid?"

"Yeah" I said. "I guess. It had its moments." None of which I wanted to describe to Felicia.

Luckily, she wasn't interested. She wasn't really interested in buying groceries either and when I was queuing at the checkout she announced she was going to wait outside.

By the time I had everything bagged and paid for and had assured the woman on the checkout that I really did not have any coupons that I wanted to use, Felicia was talking to two young boys that were hanging around with their skateboards.

"Oh, whatever dude" I heard her say to one of the boys. She sounded kind of scornful, but she was fucking smiling at the kid. Fuck, that was just…fuck. I'd spent all that time the day before recalling what she was like as a baby and now I got smacked in the fucking face with the knowledge that she really wasn't that little baby anymore, the one trailing around after me waiting to see what I did. Now she was out here, talking to strange fucking boys and…letting them put their number in her phone? Fuck. It was all wrong. If Amelia was so fucking boy-crazy why was she holed up in a room at the house while Felicia was out here collecting fucking phone numbers?

There was something fucking wrong with the world.

"Leesh!" I called out. "We're going now."

"Uh-huh" she called back, without looking at me.

"Now, Leesh!"

"Yep" she said, but she hadn't got her phone back from the guy. Or did the other kid have it now? Fuck.

"See you later" she said to the guys, and one of them called out "Yeah, tomorrow", and looked hopefully at Felicia, then down at the ground when he realised his friend was giving him a dirty look. Oh fuck, this was going to be fucking interesting.

"Who're they?" I asked Felicia as she walked over to me, without looking back at the boys she'd just left.

"What? Oh, that's Joey and I think the other one's Ryan. Brian? Something like that."

"And…?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Nothing. I was just talking to them."

"You're seeing them tomorrow?" I asked.

"Oh. They said they were going swimming. There's pools here?" I nodded, I remembered the swimming pool. "Yeah, so they said I should meet them there. Dunno though. They kept saying they liked my accent. It was a bit weird."

"Yeah, OK" I said. It was all fucking weird. I certainly felt fucking weird about the whole thing.

We drove back to the house mostly in silence, Felicia just looking out the window. As we turned into the driveway she finally said something. "I might go" she said. "Tomorrow. It's kinda boring just sitting at home."

"Yeah" I said. "It is." I'd never managed to stop her escaping from her crib after all, it was probably too late to start locking her in a bedroom now.

Wasn't it?

It fucking was. I'd hated it the night before when I'd thought I'd hurt her and she was doubting that she'd even been mine. She was so clearly mine. And if she could see how much I hated the way those fucking boys looked at her she'd know for certain.

"Well, if you want to go, I can drive you there" I said.

"Yeah. I'll think about it" Felicia replied.

SPOV

When Felicia and Eric came back with the shopping it was nearly time for Luna to arrive. I wondered how that was going to go, but didn't have much time to dwell on it as I jammed groceries into the cupboard. Eric seemed a bit quiet anyway, and not up to chatting much. He just watched Felicia as she drifted out of the kitchen after depositing the shopping bags she was carrying down.

At just after five o'clock the doorbell rang and Eric, who'd been hanging about to, I think, make sure he wasn't actually getting salad for dinner, looked at me quizzically.

"It'll be Luna" I said. "About the house."

"Yeah…" Eric said slowly, and then we walked to the door to let her in. She was tapping her foot impatiently, holding a large takeaway cup of something I hoped was decaf, and looking in the bedroom window that was next to the front door. "Oh good" she said when we opened it.

"Hi Luna" I said. "So this is Eric, and I'm not sure I properly introduced myself before. I'm Sookie."

"Uh-huh" Luna said, as her eyes flicked over Eric. I almost wanted to say 'yes, that is the loser nutjob I'm married to' but I didn't. Instead I smiled at the Asian guy standing behind her. "Oh" Luna said, following my gaze. "That's Eddie. My husband."

"Hi, Eddie" I said.

Eddie said "Hi", but he looked kind of bewildered. I wondered if it was something to do with the name, and then I missed my cats and felt quite homesick. I even missed Stan. I wondered how many other cats he'd beaten up in the cattery and whether he'd been put in solitary confinement yet. Probably. He didn't play with nice with others under the best circumstances.

I resisted the urge to offer human Eddie something to eat and he and Luna came inside. I wondered if we'd have to make small talk for a bit, but then Eric finally spoke and I realised we wouldn't. "So, you're here to make an offer on the house?" he asked Luna.

Luna pursed her lips and stared at a wall. "I'm here to look at the house. See what it's like. I don't know about an offer. Not at this stage."

"Well it won't last long" Eric said. "Not in this neighbourhood."

Luna shrugged. "It's pretty tired though. Needs a lot of work to bring it up to standard."

Eric gave her his best I don't know what you're talking about face, and then he paused, and decided to change tack all together. He turned on the charm, complete with smile. Wow. That was still quite effective even if it sometimes got pulled out just to convince me to make a hot-pot for dinner. I was tempted to say I might put an offer in when I looked over at Luna. It was totally wasted on her. She looked at Eric with disdain, and her expression could best be described as 'yeah, now you're just a loser nut-job who's smiling at me.'

Huh.

Eric carried on regardless, however. "It has good bones, this house."

Luna shrugged. "_That_ I would need to get checked out" she said. "You know, by a professional."

Eric didn't seem to mind too much that his qualifications as a property valuer were being questioned, and instead he carried on with his spiel. "Four bedrooms…" he said, as he led Luna down the hall.

"That's not a bedroom" she said, sticking her head into the room where Amelia was and ignoring Amelia saying "Who're you?" I had briefed the kids, but they forgot stuff like that pretty quickly.

"There's a bed in it" Eric said.

"It's lumpy" Amelia pointed out. "I wouldn't buy this bed."

"She's here for the house, not the bed" I said.

"Oh" Amelia said, and she turned back to her book.

"It's a single" Luna pointed out.

"It would make a great office space" Eric said. "If you didn't need another bedroom, you've got storage…"

"The closet looks small" Luna added.

"I'm keeping the stuff I found in there!" Amelia blurted out. "Aren't I?" I nodded yes, and she looked at the book again.

Eric sighed. "If it's just file storage, it would do."

"It looks dark" Luna said. "Is that damp, in the corner?"

"It just needs painting" Eric said, and then he turned and moved on. "Next bedroom" he said.

Luna looked inside. "Wallpaper is pretty outdated" she said.

"Another double room" Eric said, gesturing to the room the boys were using.

"There's a hole in that one" Luna said, pointing to the wall beside the wardrobe. I hadn't noticed that before.

"There's the bathroom" Eric said, and Luna walked in. "Uh-huh" she agreed. "The suite has to go, and those tiles, ugh. It's like my mother would have picked. It'll cost a lot to re-do this. Bathroom's are not cheap."

By this stage Eric's smile was fading and I could feel how annoyed he was getting with Luna. Luna seemed oblivious. We drifted through the main bedroom and ensuite and then onto the living room.

"Wow, this is like a time warp, this place" Luna said, looking at the wallpaper.

"Well, you'd decorate, of course" Eric said. "It's all just cosmetic."

"Uh-huh" Luna said, opening and closing the door to the hallway and listening to it squeak on its hinges. Bugger. I should have done something with that. "I do have some ideas actually. I want to paint."

"You could do a feature wall" Eric suggested, pointing to the wall behind the couch. "Maybe a nice deep, red."

Luna gave him a scornful look. "I like aqua" she said, and then she walked on in the direction of the kitchen.

"So, just a dining nook, no actual dining room?" she asked.

"No one really needs a dining room" Eric said, but Luna gave him look which suggested otherwise. Probably we should have moved some of the extra chairs we had jammed around the table.

"It's quite dark" Luna said. "You know, for a kitchen."

"I'd paint it yellow" Eric said. "That would brighten it up."

Luna shook her head. "I want white. With black accents, high-gloss. Modern. Not this kind of flouncy look." She pointed at the curtains on the kitchen windows. I sighed. I hadn't got around to them yet. "There's mould on those" she said.

"Well it's a cooking space" Eric said.

"Is the dryer not properly ventilated?" Luna asked, peering around the corner to where that sat. She looked to me for the answer. I had no idea. I'd been opening the door anyway, so I didn't think the mould was exactly my fault.

"At the end of the day what you have to accept is that it's an old house, but it's a good house, and what you're paying for is quality" Eric instructed Luna.

Luna turned to Eric. "At the end of the day what I have to do is make sure that I don't throw my money away on a dog." Eric frowned, Luna smirked, and Eddie stayed out of it. I was with Eddie on this one.

Luna walked out to the back yard and had to dodge Tray who nearly bowled her over. "It's a great space for kids" Eric said.

"So, you like the place?" I asked Eddie.

He shrugged. "I thought we were going to have dinner" he said. "And then we came here. I didn't know she wanted to buy a house."

"Yeah. I know how that works out" I said to him. "I think you guys will be very happy here." I walked outside to see what Eric and Luna were up to.

"And you'll clear the trash?" Luna asked, eyeing up the chair by the fence.

Eric shrugged. "I have to move back to New Zealand, so anything you want, make an offer on."

Luna looked like she'd be more willing to pay us to take away all of Stan's old stuff.

"And it's a great neighbourhood" Eric said, looking around. "You know Mrs Noble next door has lived there for about forty years."

"Mmm" Luna said, unimpressed.

"You know, uh, Grant De Souza?" Eric asked.

"From down at the fire station?" Luna asked.

"Yeah" Eric confirmed. "That's Mrs Noble's grandson. So you know this whole block is on their list of priority callouts." Luna nodded at that. I wondered if Eric knew that before or after he set fire to a chair.

"And the neighbours all look out for each other. Hi, Isaac!" Eric called out, as he raised a hand in greeting. I followed his gaze and saw he was waving at Miriam and Immanuel's dad. He waved back at Eric, and looked clearly terrified. I wondered how the hell Eric had managed to learn the name of a neighbour so quickly when he was pretty clueless as to who lived in our street at home. Maybe the guy wasn't really called Isaac?

"Our kids have been over there a lot" Eric said. "And vice versa." We all ignored the sound of Tray yelling "You're a dick, Immanuel!" from the other side of the fence.

"You could get a dog" Eric pointed out.

"I'm allergic" Luna said.

"Cat then" Eric said, dismissively. "Kids love pets."

"I don't love the cats" Sam said, as he rocked up. "Stan fucking bites me all the time. Hey, can we go down the street with Immanuel?"

"Why?" Eric asked.

"He has fireworks he wants to set off. Says there's a park down there."

I could see Eric was torn between keeping up the whole façade of 'isn't it great how the kids just muck in' and telling Sam not to set anything on fire. In the end Sam lucked out. "Sure" Eric said, and then he turned to Luna. "It's a safe neighbourhood, of course."

"Uh-huh" Luna said, dryly. "Maybe not anymore." Sam gave her his version of Eric's annoyed look, which she ignored too, and then he ran off after Tray and Immanuel who had been hovering in the background to see what the verdict was.

"There was that spate of burglaries down the block" Eddie said, and Eric turned the annoyed look on him. Yeah, it worked where Eddie was concerned, because he shut up at that point.

"OK, well I think we've seen enough now" Luna said, walking back into the house.

"Just let me know what your offer is" Eric said. "I think once we list the place, it won't last long."

"Yeah, you'll hear from me" Luna said. "Come on, Eddie."

We all walked back through the house to the front door. "I hate this glass" Luna said, staring at the panels in the front door.

"It's just glass though" Eric pointed out. "Glass can be changed. In fact you could do a lot with this place. I'd extend, out the back over the patio. Build a family room. Just make sure you get someone in to manage it all, a project manager. Some of those contractors will fucking take you for everything they can."

Luna's face lit up. "Oh, I know" she said. "But I'd do it myself. The project management. I don't trust anyone else with my money. Plus, you know, I'll need something to do." She patted her rather significant bump while Eddie gazed at her fondly.

"Well, sure. Your call" Eric conceded. "But the point is, you could change the house. Hell, you could bulldoze the house and start again, but you won't get a plot of land around here for love nor fucking money. Not in the near future anyway."

Luna's gaze drifted over to Mrs Noble's house. "How old do you reckon she is?" she said, smiling.

Eric smiled back. "I happen to know she has at least three kids lining up to take that place on. You'd be lucky."

"OK, well. I'll think about it" Luna said. "Thanks for showing us around."

"No problem" Eric said, smiling at her. "Come back anytime."

"Yeah, nice to meet you both" I said.

Luna shrugged. "Well, I wasn't going to let this one go" she said. "When my cousin Carlos said that his wife had bumped into the guy they went to school with whose dad owned it and he'd died I figured why not just ask if we could see it?"

I nodded, not sure what to say to that. So, everyone knew everyone else's business here. That was kind of weird. I said goodbye again and shut the door.

"Who's Carlos?" I asked Eric.

"Fucked if I know Sookie" he said, and then he started walking down the hall.

"But…so, was that all just bullshit?" I asked. "Knowing the neighbours' names and stuff? Or do you really know?" I waited, but Eric didn't answer, he just kept walking and I could hear that Pam had arrived home and was regaling Eric with the detail of everything she and Miriam had done. I guessed I'd never know the answer.

But it was probably bullshit.

**A/N One last thing, the last few chapters have all been written with the song _Everything's Going to Be Alright_ by The Babysitter's Circus going around and around in my head. The reason it does that is that it's the toddlers favourite song at the moment and we play it a lot. She'd like to share it with you, so if you check out www (dot) thebabysitterscircus (dot) co (dot) nz you can see the clip of the song. You'll just have to imagine the 2 year old singing "Everyfings gonna be a-wight nowwww!" though for yourselves.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	36. Chapter 36

**A/N Hello! So for those of you still with me, I think we're nearing the end of this one. So I'm looking for suggestions of anything in particular people want to see. I have a couple of ideas, plus something I'm going to do as a bonus chapter, but feel free to chuck stuff at me, and you can go as far into the future as you want. I have a lot of stuff worked out.**

**The toddler says 'sniff' as she has a cold and is a bit sad. There's lots of 'pick up me!' around here at the moment. The cat is in disgrace for using the kitchen for the ritual killing and dismemberment of two field mice. It's kind of weird to find two little corpses laid out side by side missing their heads. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

Just after we got rid of the buyer Sookie had found for the house, that fucking odd woman who wanted me to think she was buying the place out of the goodness of her heart, I ran into Pam, who was just arriving home again.

"Did you have fun?" I asked her.

"Yes!" she said enthusiastically. "Smell me!" She held up her arm and I almost took a step closer to it but instead I got assaulted by a cloud of synthetic sweetness right where I was. "Um, yeah. Very nice" I said.

"You didn't smell" Pam accused. "You have to be closer."

"No. No, I could smell it. It's, uh, very sweet" I said.

"It's Miriam's Hello Kitty body spray. This arm's Strawberries and Cream, and this arm…" she held up the other arm, "…is Bubblegum. But I liked the Strawberries and Cream the best."

"Um…yeah" I said. I hated all of it. Pam stank quite frankly and I just hoped I was sitting down-wind of her at dinner.

"And look!" she said, holding up a red can with a white cat on it. "Miriam gave it to me!"

"Oh" I said. "That's nice." It really fucking wasn't because that stuff was giving me a fucking headache. I loved Pam, but she needed a shower really badly now.

"Yeah" Pam said. "So I'll always smell like Strawberries and Cream now! And then I'll think of Miriam. So that's good, isn't it Daddy?" She looked up at me expectantly.

"Um…yes?" I said. I wasn't overly convinced. I hoped like fuck she used all of that shit up before anyone had to sit next to her on a plane.

"Oh God, what's Mum been cleaning with?" Felicia said, as she came in to the kitchen.

Pam shrugged. "I wasn't here" she said. "I was next door. With Miriam."

"Yeah, yeah. Blah, blah, Miriam, blah, blah" Felicia said, opening the fridge door. "Why isn't there any Sprite?" she asked the room at large.

"Someone drank it" Pam supplied.

Felicia sighed. "Should have bought more when we were out, Dad" she said. Fuck, I didn't know it had all gone. She looked around and spied a glass. "Mum took it all!" she said.

"She's allowed, Felicia" I pointed out. "And you can have water and be happy with it."

She walked over, before picking up the glass and sniffing it. "Smells weird" she said. "But not weird like the other smell."

"I smell like Strawberries and Cream!" Pam said, and Felicia turned around. "You sti…" she started to say, but she was cut off by Sookie arriving in the kitchen with us. "Don't drink that Felicia!" she said.

"I was just checking what it was" Felicia said, grumpily. She put the glass back on the counter.

"It's got gin in it" Sookie said.

"Gin?" Felicia said, wrinkling her nose up. "Ugh." She shrugged and then walked back over to the refrigerator and peered inside again. "I guess I'll have juice then" she said, pulling some out.

Sookie looked over at me, and looked a bit embarrassed. "I found the alcohol stash" she said. "But I didn't have any tonic."

"Uh-huh. Has the day been that bad?" I asked.

"Well…it's a bit full-on" she said. She sighed and took a swig of the drink. "There's a lot to do around here." She just stood there with one hand on her hip staring down the hallway. "We really need to get a move on with clearing the place out. Especially if we're going to be selling the place soon."

Yeah, fuck. That wasn't a job I was looking forward to. Going through all of Dad's shit in his closet had been bad enough. Trying to make a decision on what to do with every individual thing in the place, was just...fuck. Too much to contemplate. And the garage would be worse. I decided not to worry about it and just try to do something for Sookie instead. "OK. Well, I'll make dinner then" I suggested.

"You will?" Sookie asked, then she shrugged in the same way Felicia just had. "Alright then. You're on dinner."

"Well, I'd hate you to be so stressed you have to drink your way through all the alcohol Dad had stashed around here."

"Yeah, ha ha. I was just hot and needed a drink. And I know you're only doing it so you can make sure you don't really get salad for dinner." Sookie smiled at me, and I ignored the comment. I was pretty sure she wasn't going to really make a salad for dinner, but there had been a lot of salad stuff on that shopping list she'd given me earlier. Luckily, I had back-up plan.

Sookie took another drink. "Oh, and speaking of stressful, can you go down and find the boys and make sure they're not setting fire to anything or anyone?" she asked.

"Yeah, OK" I said. "Come on, Pam. You can come too." Hopefully a walk in the fresh air would get rid of some of the stench that was clinging to her.

"OK" Pam said, and she pulled out the can of spray and gave herself another once-over for good measure, while I tried very hard not to breathe any of it in accidentally. Fuck, that stuff was strong.

"Oh, God Pam" Felicia said, as she left the room holding her nose with one hand and a glass with the other.

"Is that the smell?" Sookie asked and I nodded. There was no missing Pam at the moment. "OK, come on Pam" I said, and I walked down the hallway and out the front door. I could tell Pam was following me, because I could smell her.

Still, I probably didn't have to worry about any dogs jumping out at us.

"Miriam said I can come back tomorrow" Pam said, as she skipped along beside me.

"That's nice" I said. At least Pam had a built-in playmate while we were here.

"Yeah…I really like Miriam." There was silence for a bit and I realised that maybe I was walking slightly too fast for Pam because her little legs were working quite hard to keep up with me. I slowed down and Pam stopped breathing quite so hard.

"Who was that lady?" she asked.

"What lady?" I couldn't see a lady. Fuck knows the humans around here were probably giving Pam a wide berth too at the moment.

"The one you were talking to before. When you waved at Miriam's daddy? Who was that?"

"Someone your mother met. She wants to buy the house."

"What house?"

"That house, Pam. The house we're staying in. The one my dad used to live in."

"She does?" Pam asked. "But it's not that great."

"Nope, but that doesn't matter as long as she gives us what it's worth."

"And then, where do we live?" Pam asked.

"We go home Pam" I said. "We don't stay here."

Pam stopped skipping. "But…" she said. "I like it here."

"I know you do" I said. "But it's not home."

"Could be home" Pam said, jutting out her chin. "Didn't you used to live here?"

"Yeah, but that was a long time ago." And even then I'd wanted something better. "It's not my home now."

"But…" Pam thought for a moment. "You sound like all the people here. Well most of the people. Miriam's dad sounds a bit different. He's from New York. Can we go there? In the van?"

"No" I said, trying to imagine exactly how that would work. I figured we'd make it as far as Vegas and then we'd lose Tray in a casino while I was trying to stop Sookie wallowing in a pit of alcoholic despair at being cooped up with her children any more. And I might be tempted to leave Amelia behind at a gas station if she whined too much. And currently there was the possibility that we'd all die anyway, choked in a cloud of Pam's noxious perfume. No, Pam was shit out of luck on that one.

Pam sighed. "Can we drive to Disneyland?"

"No. Not this trip." It was just too far and too expensive and wasn't going to happen. Not when we had so much to do at the house, which I wasn't going to even think about now.

Pam sighed. "I don't get to do anything I want!" she half-yelled. "I want to stay here and you're not letting me!"

"No" I said, as reasonably as I could, while pretending the whole idea of staying in that house any longer than I had to didn't give me fucking heart palpitations. "No, we're not staying here. We don't live here. We live in New Zealand."

"Why?" Pam asked. "Why do we live in New Zealand? We could live here."

"Free dental care, Pam."

"Dental what?"

"Yeah. The dental nurse. It's free. You don't fucking get that here. And teeth are important."

"But, no" Pam said. Fuck, she never just shut up and admitted she was wrong, did she? "That's not a reason to live there."

"It is, Pam. Until you can pay for your own dental treatment, it definitely is. Come on, let's keep walking."

"I don't think that's right" Pam grumbled, but she did at least start walking again, although she wasn't skipping this time. That was a pretty big indication of what kind of mood she was in.

Sure enough Sam, Tray and that kid from next door were down at the park around the block letting off firecrackers and generally looking like they might be trouble. The kid's dad was there with them, standing well back, but when he saw me arrive he kind of nodded and then said "If you're OK, I might head back home", and then he took off, leaving me in charge. Fucking nice for him. It was tempting to just keep walking and pretend that none of the juvenile delinquents were mine, but Tray ruined that idea by yelling out "Dad! Dad, watch this!"

Fuck. Why was he so fucking loud?

"Yep" I said, walking closer to them. "Just don't set fire to yourselves. Or anything else."

Tray turned to the kid from next door. "Chair got burned at our house" he said.

"Yeah. I saw it" the kid said, solemnly. "And I got to see the fire truck when it came to put it out. The sirens were really loud."

"You did?" Tray asked him. "I didn't. That kind of sucks."

"OK. Enough about the chair. Let's see this" I said.

"That chair looks weird" Pam grumbled. Yep she was in a fucking mood now.

"Don't get too near them, Pam" I warned her. Fuck, she still smelt horrific and I didn't need her going up in a ball of flames as a result of being doused in so much whatever-the-fuck those chemicals that were producing that stench were.

"Why?" she asked.

"Just don't" I said.

"You make the rules for _everything_" Pam complained.

"Yes I do."

Pam sighed. "You don't care about me!" she wailed.

"No, I do care Pam. I care very much that at the moment you are highly flammable and I would hate to have to take you back to Sookie as just a little pile of ashes."

Pam looked thoughtful, and we watched Tray light one of the firecrackers. "Stand back!" he yelled, running away from it giggling. It made a kind of bang, and there was some fizzing, but not much other than that happened.

"What's high-lee-flam-bibble?" Pam asked.

"Things that burn really well" Sam said, as he came over to join us. "Like the chair."

"Nah, the chair didn't burn that well until he threw the bottle on it" the kid from next door said, pointing at me. "Then the flames got really big. That was kind of cool." He looked up at me and seemed kind of impressed. Fuck. I had not known there was an audience.

"You burned it?" Sam said. "I thought it was an accident?"

"OK" I said. "Tray, pack that up. Time to go home."

"No…but…" Tray looked around. "But I was…"

"Nope. We're going now. We're making dinner. Well, I am. You're helping."

"What'd I do?" asked Tray, sounding distressed.

"Nothing. But your mom said she's over cooking and it might be salad."

"Salad's not dinner" Sam said. "Salad's just…salad."

"I know" I said. "So in the interests of not having salad for dinner we are going home to make something else."

"What?" Pam demanded.

"Something. Something that isn't salad. So, come on before your mother runs out of gin and there's a real crisis."

"OK" Tray said, shrugging. He and the kid packed up the remaining firecrackers and we all started up the street. At least they'd all stopped talking about the fucking chair. Pam skipped alongside me, so she seemed to be feeling better about things, and the boys followed along behind.

"We can't do this at home" Sam complained. "You only get about five days a year for fireworks."

"Really?" the kid asked.

"Yeah" Tray agreed. "It's the _law_. Dad says it's 'cos we live in a nana state."

"Nanny state" Sam corrected. "It's nana-naps. You know, when he falls asleep on the couch and Mum says 'oh, look he's having a nana-nap again'." Fuck. Did she?

"You don't look like a nana" Pam whispered to me. "They have cardis."

There was a lull in the conversation for a while. "So were the flames really high? When the chair burned?" Tray asked. Fuck. It was too good to last, wasn't it?

"Yeah" the kid said. "They were. I thought the house might get burned too. But your dad was really brave and he helped them put it all out. It was a really good night."

"Dad killed someone once" Tray confided. "He is very brave. But we don't talk about it. Why don't we talk about it, Sam?"

"You're talking about it now" Sam grumbled. "Because it upsets Mum, is why."

"Oh yeah. So don't tell Mum. Although I think she knows. She knew the guy. But there were serious amounts of blood, everywhere."

"Awesome" the kid said,

"Yep" Tray agreed.

Oh, fuck it. I wasn't going to get involved in that one. It was too hard to explain.

Pam sniffed her arm. "I'm going to need more spray when I get home" she muttered.

"You're great as you are, Pam" I assured her. Yep, some things you could ignore, but some things you needed to put a stop to.

SPOV

I came out of Amelia's room where I'd had to vacuum around her and put up with much sighing and moaning that I was making it 'hard to concentrate on her assignment'. Yeah, she had the laptop out, but I suspected that mostly she was just emailing her friends.

I was alerted to the fact Eric had come back with the boys and Pam when Tray came running up and said "Dad's making nachos!" He sounded really excited about that, despite the fact it wasn't like it was the first time Eric had cooked. It wasn't even the first time he'd made nachos. It was possibly the hundredth time; he didn't have a huge repertoire of dishes, after all. Supermarket surprise happened on Eric's watch for a reason.

But somehow whatever Eric made, there was rejoicing in the hills. I was pretty sure that at this point I could have roasted a whole swan and the most I'd get would be a "Huh. Swan. Again" out of someone, before they all went back to arguing over who had the most potatoes and pestering me for ice cream afterwards.

"That's nice" I said to Tray.

"It's not salad!" he said to me. Loudly.

"No" I agreed. "It's not salad."

"So it's a _real_ dinner, eh Mum?"

"I think salad's a real dinner" I said, and Tray looked at me like I was barmy. "No it's not" he argued. "It's _just_ salad. Dad said, and Sam said."

Oh terrific, so both of them over-ruled me now. That didn't seem fair. "Tray, salad's a real dinner. It might not be your first choice for dinner, but it's still a real dinner."

Tray looked intensely sceptical at that. And then he shrugged. "But it's nachos tonight" he said.

"Courtesy of the Eric Northman School of Fine Cuisine" I added.

Tray looked a bit perplexed at that one. And then he gave up and ran off.

I put the vacuum cleaner away and went into the kitchen to see if I could help. Eric was in full supervisory mode watching Sam as he stirred the pan of minced beef and whatever else was in there. "Going OK?" I asked, as Eric helped himself to a corn chip out of an open bag that was sitting on the kitchen bench.

"S'OK" Sam answered for Eric, seeing as he had his mouth full. "We found the spices and stuff. Need more cayenne pepper though."

"Uh-huh" I said. Crap. Eric tended to work on the idea that everything just got chucked in. And sure, that was mostly the way I tended to cook. But he could be a bit heavy-handed. I just hoped that there hadn't been a lot of cayenne pepper when he'd used it up.

"But we added some of that chilli stuff in too, didn't we Dad?" Sam asked, and Eric nodded. "So it'll be OK."

"OK" I said, wondering if I should taste it. Or if maybe the chef would do it. Executive chef, judging by the way that Eric was kind of standing around watching the actual work being done.

"Can I put the chips on the plates now?" Pam asked.

"Yep" Eric said, handing her the bag. Well, they seemed to have it all under control, so I went to move some washing from the machine into the dryer. "Anyone want to help me?" I asked. There was total silence.

I wasn't all that surprised.

Dinner was nice, although slightly on the spicy side. Poor Pam looked a bit tearful part-way through. "You OK?" I asked her.

"Yeah" she said, as she took a big gulp of water. "I'm fine."

"I like it" Tray said, shovelling more food into his mouth.

"There's a lot of meat" Amelia said, pushing her food around. "I don't know why we have to eat so much meat? Why can't we have something good? Like salad?"

Everyone else ignored Amelia, it was clear she was as loopy as I was. "I like salad" I said to Amelia and she gave me a look, the one which said 'please don't pretend you and I are anything alike as it's clear that you're really old and don't know anything about my problems'. Yeah, I'd seen that one before.

After dinner it was the same as the previous night, there was running around, and shouting and arguing over the TV. This was followed by some arguing over the TV vs. the PlayStation. General complaints about the lack of TVs in the house. A lecture from Amelia about the benefits of reading. A small rant from Felicia about the stupidity of the stuff Amelia chose to read. A long drawn-out recitation from Pam of everything Miriam had in her bedroom and how pretty it was. A discussion about how much Pam stank now and how she needed a shower. Some tears from Pam which could only be stopped by Eric hugging her and telling her she didn't stink while he made a weird kind of face that suggested he was trying to talk and hold his breath at the same time. There was a fight between Tray and Sam over the 'rules' for using the PlayStation and then there was a fun game of 'find the kids' when it was time to get them to all to take a shower.

There was an argument between Eric and Pam when she tried to take her new body spray into the bathroom to re-apply after her shower which ended with Pam stamping her foot and yelling "You don't get to boss me all the time!" This was followed by a strongly worded, and loud, lecture from Eric as to why he did get to boss her all the time and would until she could afford to buy her own house and move into it.

Around this time Sam came to me and asked if he could take Tray for a walk around the block because they didn't have Ivan (no, he couldn't). Then Felicia arrived and wanted to know if she could ban Pam from the room they were sharing as she smelt (no, and she had to be nice to Pam). Amelia wanted to know if she could borrow my credit card to top up her phone (yes, but not for too much), and then Tray came back and asked if there was anything to eat (no, because it was bedtime).

Bedtime involved telling Felicia to let Pam in the bedroom, telling Pam to let Eric in the bedroom to say goodnight, telling Sam and Tray to stay in their bedroom, telling Amelia that tomorrow she had better come out of that bedroom and be sociable, telling Pam that it was perfectly reasonable we wanted to sell this house and all its bedrooms, telling Tray that no, he couldn't move the TV and the PlayStation into the bedroom he was in just because he wasn't sleepy, and reiterating that no, Daddy wasn't going to let Pam buy this house with the money from her piggy-bank even if she had 'quite a bit' in there now. And then finally, finally, most of them seemed to get the message.

Sometimes I wondered what the houses with fewer children were like. I suspected that Miriam's mum and dad had long since reached the part of the night where they could sit down with each other.

I took the basket of clean washing into the bedroom Eric and I were using and put it on the bed. Eric was sitting on it with the laptop balanced across his legs, muttering to himself. He was trying to catch up on some work, but that seemed to involve saying "fuck" a lot. I guessed he'd missed a few days of sitting in his office swearing to himself. It wasn't really an activity that needed an audience so I decided to go and see Amelia and try to prise my credit card back out of her grasp.

"What?" she said when I opened the door to her room.

"I came to say goodnight" I said. "And, uh, grab that card back." She reached over to where it was and handed it to me as I sat on the bed with her.

"You said goodnight. When you said I have to go and 'play' with the kids tomorrow. I'm not a kid. I don't want to hang out with all of them. They suck."

"Just be nice, Amelia. Anyway, we could talk."

"Talk?" Amelia said, like she'd never thought of the concept before.

"Yeah. You know. Hang out. Eric's busy and most of the others are asleep, although I have my suspicions about Felicia…" I'd heard some familiar foot-steps

"I'm just going to the loo!" Felicia said from out in the hallway.

"You're just spying on me!" Amelia accused.

Felicia's head appeared around the door. "No" she said. "What's there to spy on? It's just you, sitting there, reading your books and dreaming of Riley."

"No!" Amelia said. "No, it's not. I'm…" she gave up as Felicia had left and was now on her way, I hoped, to the bathroom.

"She is infuriating!" Amelia complained.

"She's just curious" I said.

"What about?" Amelia asked.

"Oh, you know. You. What you're up to. What it's like to be a teenager."

Amelia frowned. "She's just dumb, is what she is. Did you know she met some boys today? At the supermarket? They asked her to go swimming with them. I mean, why? It's Felicia. She's just…she's just…" Amelia didn't finish that, and she looked up at me pleadingly, as though she wanted me to explain exactly what it was that the boys had seen in her annoying little sister. Felicia had mentioned something about the pools and asked if I was sure I'd packed everyone's togs at dinner, but I hadn't known about the boys. Huh.

"Well, um. I guess they just want to be friends with her" I said.

"But they're _boys_. You can't have boys as friends!"

"Well you can. Isn't Riley your friend?"

Amelia looked thoughtful. "Kind of. But it's different. He's not a friend like Chloe because, well, you know…" She blushed a bit.

"Because you fancy him?" I suggested.

"Mum!" Amelia said, looking horrified at the suggestion.

"Well, it's OK if you do" I said. In fact as much as I hated the idea, and Eric didn't want to think it was even possible, it was quite within the bounds of reason that she did. And probably Riley would be grateful if Amelia liked him about half as much as he liked her.

I did, however, still kind of miss the days when her true love had been a fictional sparkly vampire who wasn't going to take her away from me.

"Riley's just…well…" Amelia looked over at the pile of books on the bedside table. "You know…Riley."

"Well, that's OK" I said. "Better he be that than try to be anything else."

"Yeah, but isn't he supposed to be someone else? I mean…I just…" She stopped and looked at the books again.

"They're not like real life, Amelia" I said. "You know that, right? They're like, um…fairy tales for grown-ups."

Amelia wrinkled her nose. "Grown-ups don't need fairy tales" she said.

"Well they do, but there's less glass slippers and more, um…" I thought the word 'orgasms' and my brain tried desperately to think of something else. "Well, you know. Less millionaires and princes and handsome strangers."

"You think Dad was a handsome stranger" Amelia said, in a voice which suggested that I was basically off with the fairies.

"Well OK, he kind of was." Amelia curled her lip and I ignored her. "But not in the way those books would have written him. There'd be less swearing, for one thing, if he was in those books."

Amelia looked unconvinced. "But he's a real person" she said. "So, you know, it's like…not the same thing."

"Why?"

"Well, it's just not."

"So you see what I'm saying then? That real guys aren't going to suddenly turn up and…" I picked up one of the books "Sweep you off your feet ..._in a once in a_ _lifetime passionate affair on a remote island paradise..._, and then, um, ..._once at home, the lover she pined for makes a dramatic re-appearance as the new head of_ _the research facility she's dedicated her life's work to..._, so that, um, ..._in the end she's forced to choose between her love for her job, and her love for the man she thought she'd never get to keep_. See? That's all a bit far-fetched really."

"No" Amelia said, grumpily. "It's really good that one."

"I'm sure they're all really good, but just don't think that's what you'll get in real life. That's all I'm saying. Real men, well, it's kind of different. I mean, you know."

"What do I know?" Amelia said.

"Oh, that they think farts are funny, and swear you never told them the important stuff they had to do, and leave wet towels on the bed, and trip over your shoes and then blame you because they didn't see where they were putting their own big feet. They embarrass you in a carpark by getting out of the car and yelling at the person they thought stole their spot, and never remember that cleaning the guest bathroom is a chore."

"Yeah, but I don't think you can, like, base _everything_ on Eric" Amelia said.

"Yeah, but they all come with faults."

Amelia looked thoughtful. "All of them?" she said.

"Definitely. Bill liked me to do things his way, or he'd go really, really quiet and just not talk to me. Our record for not talking to each other was four days."

"It was?" Amelia said. "I can't imagine not talking to someone for four days."

"No! It was bloody hard work, I can tell you. I kept wanting to say something, but I was damned if I was going to break first. So I gritted my teeth and I held out."

"What were you fighting about?" Amelia asked.

"I can't really remember" I confessed. And I couldn't, it was a long time ago. I could definitely remember, though, the feeling of not wanting to let him beat me by talking first. In the end Bill cracked and sent me an email asking if we were free to go to Lorena's on Sunday. I think I did a small victory dance in my chair at work, although it was a short-lived victory given that I had to go and hang with his family at the weekend. "I think it might have been over me changing my name. We had a few disagreements over that."

"I can't imagine, like, a silent fight" Amelia said. "You and Dad are so _loud_. Well, he is. When he yelled at Pam before I could hear it all the way down here."

I shrugged. "I know. It sucked doing it that way. I much prefer just yelling and getting it over with. Of course I had to teach Eric how to do that, but he seems to have the hang of it now. He and Pam made up at bedtime. Well, mostly." I was actually a bit worried about the two of them and Pam's desire to stay here with Miriam. I hoped she got over it.

"But, you said they didn't change? Guys? That you couldn't change them?"

"Um…you don't change them. You can, um, maybe get them to compromise with you? On some stuff, anyway. But they'll still be them at the end of it. And I guess that's how you know that you found a good one. Because they don't arrive out of the sky perfect, but you'll put up with some of the annoying stuff because the good stuff is better than you get elsewhere."

Amelia shrugged. "It's just confusing. So, I'm not supposed to think any guy's going to be perfect, but I should wait for _my_ perfect guy and I'll know him because he annoys me, but I don't care because I think he's hot anyway?"

"Um…kind of." It did sound confusing when she put it like that. "Just know that there's not a manual for it all, everyone's different. So whatever you do, don't take those books as the only way a relationship happens. And remember, there are two sides to it. For all that you might not find the most perfect guy in the world, don't expect there'll be someone thinking you're the most perfect woman either. If you ask Eric about it he will probably tell you that farts _are_ funny, and he has the Google search results to prove it; I talk too much around the important subjects and need to send him an email occasionally, in bullet-point format. That I make too much about a couple of towels, and that shoes belong in the wardrobe and not where I leave them. He will also ridicule the notion of a guest bathroom, which I think is really his way of saying that occasionally he wants to use a bathroom where people won't try to bust in on him. And whatever you do, don't ask him about that incident in the St Luke's carpark, because he will defend his right to get out of the car and yell at random strangers over a strip of concrete until the day he dies. And he was right. And they were wrong. And any embarrassment his family felt is totally trumped by the fact he was right."

Amelia sighed. "But I really, really like those books" she said. "And it's just not the same in real life."

"But it's nicer, in a way, isn't it? I mean, hanging out with Riley is better than reading about someone else's relationship?"

She shrugged. "Kind of. But it's not, you know…he doesn't exactly, like, _say_ stuff…and stuff…"

"Say stuff?" I asked.

"Yeah. Like tell me he likes me, and stuff like that."

Oh. Yeah, those books were full of that. But even the phrase "Sweetheart, I love you very much" gets old really quickly when it's used as the lead-in for everything from "Stop putting your feet on the coffeetable" to, "Didn't we have this for dinner last week?" Not forgetting the old favourite, "But she's my mother Sookie, and it's very important that I do this for her. You're just being deliberately difficult because you don't like her." Yeah, all of those took the shine off anything that came before them.

At least Eric just stuck with the annoyed look and didn't do much when I blanked him, other than sigh and carry on looking annoyed.

"Riley's just young" I said. "He's still figuring out how to be in a relationship. But, again, remember the books are just stories. You're maybe never going to get an outpouring of romantic phrases like the women in them do."

"I'm not?" Amelia asked. "Oh."

"Well, you might. But don't expect every guy to do it. If it comes, great, if not then…well, you'll figure it out."

Amelia frowned. "I don't know if I will. It's, like, all _really _confusing. So…I just…one day I'll meet someone? And know?"

"Yeah, and remember it's just a meeting. It's not like seeing someone and knowing instantly they're the most perfect creature you've ever seen. It's more like, um, being in a tutorial group with a guy and discussing methods of depreciation and then he asks you to the movies."

"That was Bill?" Amelia asked.

"Yep. That was Bill. It wasn't the most auspicious start. He spent a long time trying to explain straight-line depreciation to me, when I already knew. I let him. It was a dumb thing to do, really."

"I don't know what that is" Amelia asked.

"It's boring. But the point is I should have told him I knew and just moved on. I set myself up for some of the stuff that went on later."

"OK" Amelia said slowly.

"I did like him though, but I didn't know right then that I wanted to be with him. I mean, I thought he was a bit stand-offish, because he was older than the rest of us in the class and he thought we were a bit dumb, I think. So it was nice that he was interested in me, but I had to get to know him to find out if I wanted to go out with him again."

"And you did?"

"And I did."

"Even though he, like, told you stuff you already knew?"

"Yeah, because he did good stuff too. And I didn't mind being told the odd thing again." Well, not then. Later on it got really annoying. "And not every relationship lasts forever, like in those books. They make it seem like there's one person and once you're together that's it. But they stop at the point where you get together. It's everything that comes after that, that's the real relationship."

Amelia looked slightly glazed. I'd lost her with that bit. Yeah, no hope of selling the idea of five kids and a mortgage as a happily ever after to a fourteen year old. Oh well.

"Sooo…if you have sex, then it's different?" Amelia asked, out of the blue.

"What?"

"If you sleep with them, then it's like…I don't know. You stay together and stuff?"

"Oh, you don't have to" I assured her. "But you still probably want to be a bit careful with that."

"And it's nice?" Amelia asked. "Sex? It's always nice in the books. Did they lie about that too?"

"Um…" I said, trying to think of a way to word it and willing myself not to say 'no, it's terrible, don't ever do it, I just put it up with it'. "It is, but you know, it's like anything. Sometimes it, um…well, it's not always great at first."

"It's not?" Amelia asked. "Oh."

"Yeah, sometimes um...well they make it sound like it's always the best ever when they write those books. And just like you have to learn other things about each other, you have to learn, well, that kind of stuff about each other too. How to, um, please each other."

"So guys don't know?"

"Some do. They figure it out. And you get to tell them."

"Tell them what?" Amelia asked.

"Um. What you like. Or don't like. And they'll do the same, probably."

"Oh. Oh, I thought, you know, because it's _natural_...which is what you always said about the 'magic cuddle' that made babies, you said that everyone did it..."

"Well, if they wanted to have a baby. Most people do it that way, anyway."

"Yeah, so if everyone's doing it, how come they don't know how to do it?"

"Because everyone's different, Amelia. And it, um...it takes a lot of trust to really let someone else be that close to you. To share your body with them. Once you're in that kind of relationship, then you can figure out all the...the, well, the mechanics of it, I guess. It's the trust that comes first."

"So don't sleep with the first guy I meet and don't expect orgasms?" Amelia asked.

"Mmm" I said, hoping she didn't have other, more detailed questions. "But I don't think you have to worry about that quite yet." And then I thought of something. "Do you? I mean…you haven't, um…"

"Oh, no" Amelia said. "No, no. I don't, yeah, I mean…you know. It's not like I want anyone to see me naked or anything."

"Uh-huh. Well, you know. If that changes, let me know. We can, uh, talk some more."

"OK, and euw."

"Alright, well you better get to sleep or you'll be grumpy in the morning."

"Not a baby Mum! That's Pam who gets grumpy, not me."

"Uh-huh. Well, good night" I said, and I left her to her books.

Back in the bedroom Eric was still staring at the screen. "Fucking fuck fuck" he muttered.

"All a bit poos, is it?" I asked.

"Something like that" Eric mumbled. I left him to it and started to fold the washing that I'd put on the bed earlier. We worked in silence for a while and then Eric put the laptop to one side and looked at the piles on the bed. "I should be used to it by now, but the land of tiny underpants and socks still kind of freaks me out" he said.

"Well, they're getting bigger all the time" I said. "Before you know it there'll be nothing tiny anymore."

Eric pointed to a bra. "That's nice" he said. "The purple."

"That's Amelia's."

Eric withdrew his hand like it had been burned. I decided I wouldn't tell Eric about the conversation I'd had with her earlier. Not the details anyway.

"Oh" Eric said. "Um…OK."

"Yeah, I'm kind of jealous that she can fit all the pretty ones and doesn't need to worry about the width of the straps and whether it sits smoothly across the back."

Eric was now sporting the same expression Tray did when you were talking about stuff he didn't want to think about. Like salad for dinner. And then he stuck his hand into the washing basket. "So, um, who's is this?" he said, pulling out a t-shirt.

"Felicia's. Now. Used to be yours."

"Oh. Thought it looked familiar" Eric said, as he put it in Felicia's pile after I pointed to it.

"And the socks?" he asked.

"Um…" I said. That one did stump me. "Um, not sure. One of the boys."

"I'll assign them to, um, Tray" Eric said.

"No, hang on" I said, before he put them down. "If we give them to Tray and they don't fit, he'll just put up with them. If we give them to Sam, then he'll know if they don't fit him, and he'll pass them on."

"Oh. Good thinking" Eric said. "Which is Sam's pile?"

"That one."

We got all the washing folded and assigned and I did the big sneak-around to return it to the right bedrooms without waking anyone. I had to tell Amelia to definitely go to sleep now and she didn't look particularly happy about the intrusion. "I'm on holiday" she hissed.

"Well, I'm not. So go to sleep. Goodnight."

I went back to the bedroom and realised I felt kind of weary now. "Need another gin?" Eric asked, as I sat on the bed next to him. He was watching something on TV, some kind of late night show you never saw in New Zealand. I couldn't really see the point of them.

"No, it would put me to sleep" I said. "I'm kind of tired."

Eric leaned over and kissed the top of my head. "You have been working hard" he said.

"_And_ I'm nearly 45" I said, and Eric frowned a bit at that. Bugger. I hadn't meant to bring my birthday up in order to tell him he had to do anything special for it. I just wanted to get through this and get home, and then we could worry about birthdays.

"The kids are a lot of work" Eric said.

"Yep" I agreed. "They are. Honestly, bedtime used to be quite orderly when they were little, but now it takes so long to get them into the bed. And they want to argue about it! Like I'm suddenly going to say, 'you know what, don't go to bed'. It's exhausting."

"It is. But I take it from your comments last night we're just doing this for the joy of one day getting grandchildren?" Eric asked.

"Yes!" I said, emphatically. "I have heard from a reliable source, well, from Hadley anyway, that grandchildren and much nicer than actual children. For one thing, their parents have to deal with all nappy-related emergencies and unexpected vomiting, and when they get all grumpy and tired and kind of hyper, but deny they need to sleep, their parents take them home. You don't have to be the bad guy; you get to be the fun person, who gives them lollipops when they want it. Sounds like heaven."

"It does sound pretty good" Eric mused.

"And when they want to run around the back garden, you can just say 'Sorry, sweetheart. Granny needs to rest.' And then you sit there with your gin and just relax."

"Uh-huh. And that works for granddads too?" Eric asked.

I shook my head. "No. They still have to run around and do stuff. They're still young and sprightly after all."

"Sure they are" Eric said.

"Yep. They are" I said, nodding and refusing to look at Eric and the sceptical expression he was wearing. "And I am going to shuffle off to the bathroom now, and get my old self ready for bed."

I left Eric to his show and did my nightly routine. I knew it was a routine. And that it had to be done. I didn't know why the kids had to be so bloody difficult about it.

When I came out of the bathroom, Eric was laughing. At first I assumed at the TV. And then I realised that had been switched off. And he had picked up the book I'd taken from Amelia's pile of discards a few days ago. Oh, poo bum. "It's not that funny."

"It really fucking is, Sookie. I'm pretty sure that just because he works on a ranch, he doesn't have to call everyone darlin'."

"Well, that's just a…regional quirk. Or something." I picked up my bottle of body lotion and rubbed some into my legs.

"And then there's this bit" Eric said. "Where he says _'If I'd known that you were still untouched, I wouldn't have done it like that.'_ You know, just after they've fucked. In that barn."

"So?"

"So, what the fuck would he have done differently?"

"Maybe he wouldn't have had sex with her, standing up, in a barn" I said, moving on to putting body lotion on my arms.

"I don't think it would be very nice if you were lying down in a barn, Sookie. All the hay. It'd be itchy. No, it's fucking weird. Like how was he supposed to know? And why did he care?" Eric thought for a moment. "Maybe he means he would have put it somewhere else…"

"OK, stop that right now" I said. "I don't see why it's so interesting anyway."

"Oh, it's fascinating Sookie" Eric said, grinning at me over the book.

"You sound like Amelia" I said, as I put down my body lotion and got into bed.

"Has she read this one?" Eric asked, looking worried.

"Maybe." That didn't change Eric's expression much.

"With all the sex?" he said.

I shrugged. "Maybe not then. That was from the pile she didn't want. She's not a big cowboy fan, after all." It might be kinder to let Eric retain a little bit of ignorance.

"I don't know if she should be reading quite so much of that stuff" Eric said, seriously.

"Oh, I think it's fine. It's a phase. Lots of us go through it and come out the other side."

"I'm not sure you've come out the other side, Sookie. You're still reading them."

"Only because I forgot to bring a book with me. Remembered sheets and everyone's togs and forgot a book. Oh, and Tray's good shoes. Never mind. But Amelia will be fine; we've had a chat about it all."

"OK" Eric said. "I'll leave it to you then." He looked at the book again, and then put it on the bedside table, before turning to me with a grin.

"Want to pretend it's your first time?" he asked.

"Um, no. No I don't."

Eric sighed. "We could pretend it's my first time?"

"I'm not telling you where to put it, Eric" I said sternly, and he giggled.

"I would suggest sex on the patio, but I think we'd have an audience" Eric mused. I didn't want to know who he thought that might be. And then he broke into a smile. "I could pretend to be a cowboy, daaarlin'?" he suggested, drawing out the last word with a drawl.

"Please don't. I'd never understand you. How about we just be us? I'd like that better. I learned that going over all of this with Amelia earlier on."

Eric looked at me. "You were talking about your first time, with her?"

"Oh God, no. Not specifics. No, more about, um…just relationships and stuff. When I was trying to point out that the books are not like real life. I was telling her it's better, with someone you really like. That first part, all that trying to figure out if you really want to be with that person, that's exhausting. I don't want to go back to that. I'd much rather be with someone I know, and trust, and love, and who knows me."

"So…that's a vote for me then?"

"That's a vote for you. For you and me in the here and now. Because that's the other bit they leave out in the books, they forget that the story doesn't stop when you meet the person who completes you. It's about way more than that."

"I don't complete you?" Eric asked.

"Well…you make my life more interesting. There would be less shouting in the St Luke's carpark if you weren't around."

"I was indicating, Sookie. Clearly, I was indicating and that fucker…"

"Yep. So there's that." I smiled at Eric and rolled on my side so I was facing him. "You bring me a lot of joy. And a lot of pleasure." Eric ran his hand up my side, cupped my breast and ran a thumb over my nipple. "Pleasure is good" he said.

"Pleasure is very good" I agreed, trying to hold onto my train of thought. "I love that we share the kids, that you're the other half of that equation."

"So you can blame the cursing on me?"

"Um…I think it's a given that one. But more that I think we make a good team. We make a good team in most things really. And as much as I love my life now, I don't think it's complete. I hope it's not complete. I don't want it to be complete until I'm an old lady on my death-bed."

"Surrounded by children? And all those grandchildren?" Eric asked.

"Maybe even great-grandchildren. I intend to live to a ripe old age; we might be able to fit another generation in there."

"And then you'll feel complete?" Eric asked.

"Maybe. I hope so. I mean, it's not like I'm unhappy now. I'm very happy. But I hope there's more to my story."

"Me too" Eric said, leaning over to nuzzle my neck. It was kind of scratchy, as he'd shaved for the funeral but promptly given up the practice again as soon as that was over. See? Some things just never change.

"So is the next bit of your story a sex scene?" Eric asked. "Because that might be good about now."

"Well…it could be" I said, slipping further down on the pillows and lying on my back. Eric moved over me and kissed me. "I think it would make sense in the narrative flow" Eric said, as he kissed along my collarbone.

"Uh-huh." I agreed. "Just shut up and fuck me, Eric."

"Yeah, I don't think you'll get all that cursing past an editor, Sookie."

"You missed out step one Eric. Step one was 'shut up'. We can't move on to step two until you get with step one."

"You're bossy" Eric said, as he helped me pull my tank-top off. "You sure you don't want to pretend you have to show me what to do?"

"Nope. I'm handing editorial control on that over to you" I said, as I lay back down and Eric started tonguing my nipple. "I think you can handle it."

"Pretty sure you're right" Eric mumbled.

"Oh, I am" I said, as Eric kissed down my body, and started to pull my pyjama shorts off. "I'm definitely right on this one."

**A/N We use togs for swimwear and only swimwear, and we rarely say anything else. It's unusual to hear someone talk about a swimsuit, it's far more common to say "Have you got your togs?" Tara's shop in the books will, to me, always be the place where Sookie gets her bikinis.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	37. Chapter 37

**A/N So I've just been having a small discussion with the cat about how the computer mouse is my mouse and he can bog off out of it. Honestly, he's not going to find any brains to eat in this one, and if he keeps chewing the cord it's likely to not end well. **

**But thank-you to everyone who let me know what things they'd like to see in the future for this family. Feel free to keep them coming, many things I've written in these stories have been suggested to me in reviews, or just by people asking questions about what will happen. **

**And this is my second attempt to load this, as the site seemed to be a bit wobbly. Or maybe that was just me? I can't tell anymore, looking at my stats it's possible that either a lot of you missed chapter 35, or they stopped counting hits on it. Either way, something went a bit skew-wiff.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but I am willing to swap them for a cat. I think it's a fair trade.**

SPOV

I woke with a start and peered at the little white face staring at me through the early-morning gloom. It was kind of creepy and off-putting.

"How long have you been there?" I whispered to Pam.

"Not long" she whispered back. "You wouldn't wake up."

"It's not time to wake up" I pointed out. "It's sleeping time."

"But there's no more room in the bed" Pam complained, at an almost normal volume. "Felicia took it all."

"She can't have. She's not that big." I didn't think Pam knew what it was really like sharing a bed with someone who hogs it all. At that moment, my right leg was trapped under Eric and there was no way I was getting it back anytime soon. Not while he was doing such an admirable job of staying asleep while Pam and I talked.

"I want to get in with you" Pam said, clutching Mr Fluffy to her chest.

"Um…there isn't really room" I said. This bed was smaller than the one we had at home, and Eric had not magically shrunk by coming to this side of the world.

"But I want to!" Pam hissed.

"Pam…just…"I tried to think of a reasonable argument.

"Get in, Pam" Eric mumbled from his side of the bed. Great, that was easy for him to say. Pam climbed over me, over Eric, and squeezed herself in. This meant Eric shuffled even closer to me and I nearly fell out of bed.

Of course that wasn't the end of it. "Daddy?" Pam whispered. "Daddy?"

"Mmmphf?" Eric said.

"Daddy, Felicia said we're going to the pools today. Are we?"

"Maybe" Eric said, sounding half-asleep. That was half more than I was.

"But are we? Because she _said_."

"Well, I think Felicia wants to" Eric said. "Go to sleep, Pam."

"But, Daddy" Pam said. Jeez, she was really wide awake now. "Daddy, what about Miriam? Can I take Miriam too?"

"Maybe" Eric said.

"But…but, will she fit? If we take her? Are the boys going too?"

"Pam, let's discuss this after breakfast" Eric tried, and Pam was quiet. For about twenty seconds.

"But I need to _know_. Because I don't know if I want to go to the pools or not. I only want to go if Miriam is going."

"Well don't go then" Eric said. I could feel the sympathy draining out of him. Pam seemed oblivious.

"But…I want to go. I do. You packed my togs, didn't you Mum?" Pam said.

"Yes" I replied.

"So then I want to go, but only if Miriam goes. So I need to know who else is going."

"We won't know Pam, until everyone is up, but everyone isn't up, because it isn't morning yet. When it is morning, we will be able to ascertain exactly who wants to go swimming, but until that time, Pam, we are sleeping. We are all going to go back to sleep now, and worry about this much, much later on." Eric's clipped tone as he delivered that speech was certainly suggesting to me that he was getting a bit annoyed with the whole situation.

But not to Pam. She sighed, noisily, and then said "I can't sleep. I'm too hot. It's really hot in this bed"

That was it for Eric he sat up and threw the covers off of all of us, which I didn't think was fair as I wasn't the problem, and then he said in a loud voice "OK. Then let's move Felicia and get you back into that bed."

He got up and Pam trotted after him, and I could hear rustling down the hallway and more whispers. I thought I might get up and use the toilet while they were busy, and then when I got back into bed, Eric was already back there. "Jam her in OK?" I asked.

"Yep" Eric confirmed, and then we tried to get ourselves comfortable again. It wasn't easy. Apparently I wasn't laying the way Eric wanted me to; I figured that out when he tried to roll me from my back to my side with his hip.

"Ow!" I said.

"Sorry" Eric replied, without a hint of apology in his voice.

I decided to cut my losses and rolled over, and then I tried to curl my legs back behind me, but Eric complained. "Your heels are digging into me" he said.

"Well, I just want to put my feet there."

"But I'm there" Eric said. That didn't really help, because he was pretty much everywhere as far as the area of the bed was concerned.

"I just want a little bit of room" I pleaded and Eric relented and allowed my feet to touch his shins. I relaxed into a pleasant state of drowsiness. And then I woke up again.

"What was that?" I asked. Eric didn't answer. I wondered if he was actually asleep or pretending, because after all these years of having kids, Eric was pretty good at pretending. I moved my foot around on his leg and maybe gave him a little jab. He made a grumpy noise at me.

Just pretending then.

"I heard something" I said.

"I felt something" Eric replied. "Go to sleep."

"It's them" I said, realising what the noise was. "Tray and Sam are up."

"That's nice" Eric said. He really didn't care.

"Is it…what time is it?" I said, struggling to lift up to look. But I didn't have a bedside clock in this house, so it was no use. I looked at the window. That didn't tell me a lot. It was summer…but wrong hemisphere. Was it different here? I was stumped on that one.

"What's the time?" I asked Eric.

"Sleeping time" Eric replied.

"No, actual time."

"Yes, I am actually intending to sleep now, Sookie."

I sighed, and then I sat up and leaned over Eric to try to see his phone. "Are you waking me up for sex?" Eric asked, as I partially covered his face with my torso.

"No, you're asleep" I told him.

"I wish I fucking was" Eric grumbled.

"Yep, join the club." I sounded a bit terse, but I was. I'd just seen the phone and realised it wasn't even 5am yet.

I got out of bed and walked into the living room. "Bed" I said to Tray, as he turned around still clutching the PlayStation controller.

"What?" Tray asked.

"Go back to bed."

"But I got up" Tray said. Sam arrived in the room carrying a glass of water.

"I don't care, go back to bed."

"But…but, Muuum!" Tray whinged. "But I'm not sleepy anymore, so I'd just be lying there."

"I don't care" I said again, wishing everyone listened to me the first time. "Everyone else is sleeping, so go back to bed and stay quiet."

"Dad got up" Tray grumbled, putting down the controller. Sam had realised that defeat was inevitable and had turned off the TV.

"Dad had to help Pam" I said.

"Pam's up?" Tray asked.

"No. Not now. Go back to bed!" I didn't understand why that was such a difficult concept for Tray.

He slowly stood up and shuffled off, Sam trailing after him. From the hallway I heard Tray whisper "Mum's grumpy in the mornings" and Sam whisper back. "No coffee. Dad's not up." And then their bedroom door shut, and I went back to my bed.

Only it wasn't my bed any longer. "Move over" I hissed to Eric. Eric said something that was maybe "nrrgh" or perhaps "mrrf" and moved one of his legs.

"That's not enough" I pointed out.

"You can cuddle me" Eric said holding his arms out in front of him but not opening his eyes.

I sighed. I wondered how to put it to him tactfully. "You're hot and you make me hotter. I don't want to cuddle you, I want my own space." Maybe that wasn't that tactful, but I was now desperate to get back to sleep and everyone was thwarting me.

"You are grumpy in the mornings" Eric said.

"Will everyone stop saying that!" I complained.

"Well stop being grumpy, then" Eric said, sounding kind of reasonable.

"Oh, just move over."

"Fine" Eric huffed, and he shuffled over a bit, so I could get in. But it took me a long time to get anywhere close to sleep again. And it felt like no sooner had I done so, but the sun was up and so were most of the kids.

"It's not _your_ TV" Felicia yelled. "We have to share it!"

I didn't really understand why I had to share all their problems just because I was Mum. "Dad!" Felicia said, coming into the bedroom. I hunkered down and pretended to be asleep. "Dad, come and tell them."

Eric didn't do anything. "I know you're not asleep" Felicia said.

"No, I really am" Eric said from behind me.

"No, you're really not. They're back using the PlayStation again."

"Mmm, I'm off-duty" Eric said. I didn't know how that worked. When did we get to be off-duty? How come I wasn't aware of that one?

"It's no fun here!" Felicia moaned. "This place is too small." And then she stomped out. I tried to relax again, but it was no good. I was acutely aware of everything going on in the house and wondering when the next crisis would hit. Or the next kid turn up.

"So I have my togs, don't I?" Pam asked.

"Yes" I said, thinking we'd been over that one several hours earlier.

"Can I go and show them to Miriam?"

"No" Eric said. "No, you have to stay here."

Pam humphed and walked out.

"Leesh won't share the TV" Tray complained.

"Are you sharing with her?" Eric asked him.

"But I want to play the PlayStation."

"I think that might be your problem, then" Eric pointed out. Tray didn't reply. He just sighed and walked out.

Sam came in. "How come you're sleeping in?" he asked.

"Just haven't got up yet" I replied.

"OK. I'll make some food then." And then he wandered off too.

"Hey!" Amelia screamed from somewhere else. "I was asleep! You don't wake people up when they're ASLEEP!"

I was tempted to get out of bed and tell her that that seemed to be exactly what happened around here, but it would have required moving Eric off of me, as he'd crept closer and closer and was now half-lying on me again. So much for getting my own space.

"I think we'll have to get up" I said, and Eric ignored me, so I started shuffling towards the edge of the bed. "Nooo" Eric said. "I'm cuddling you."

"But the kids are…well, I don't know what they're doing."

"Can't hear anything" Eric said, as he put his arm over me and squeezed my torso, kind of roughly. Then he grabbed my boob and gave it a little squeeze, before settling himself down with me clamped against him with nowhere to go. How had I ended up back here again?

"Um…yeah, that's not a good sign" I pointed out.

"No, it is" Eric assured me. "They've all gone out, got jobs and become worthwhile members of society who don't need their parents anymore."

"Phfft. Like that'll ever happen. One day I will just move into that retirement village in Mt Eden and leave you all to it. You can have the house, the kids and the pets and I will have a quiet little flat and unlimited access to the TV remote."

"Meh, you'd be too easy to find there" Eric pointed out.

"Well…maybe I'll retire on the Gold Coast. Then it will be harder to find me."

"But not impossible, Sookie. There is such a thing as Google these days, you know."

"Alright!" I said. "I could change my name." As soon as I'd said it I immediately regretted it. I wasn't sure if that was something you could joke about with someone who had actually changed their name.

"You could" Eric said, and I figured it was OK. "I'd let you use mine…" he said, and I hoped like hell he wasn't going to suddenly bring up the name change thing nearly 10 years after our civil union. I'd had enough of going over that little issue when I'd fought over it with Bill. "But I got it first, so get your own" Eric continued.

"No wonder the kids don't share" I said to him.

"The kids are learning a valuable lesson, Sookie. Competition for scarce resources is something they'll have to deal with out there in the real world."

"Spoken like a true capitalist" I said, and Eric ignored me. "I didn't know I was scarce resource" I added.

"Well…I was actually thinking more of the TV, but fine, there's only one of you too."

"God, you're lovely to me sometimes, Eric."

"I'm cuddling you. I don't know what more you want from me" Eric said.

"You could get up and make me coffee?" I suggested.

Eric sighed. "Why can't you be someone who's happy with a simple cuddle? It's all want, want, want with you."

"Dad!" Tray yelled. "Dad, can I have the stuff in the garage? If Amelia gets the stuff from that wardrobe, can I have the garage stuff?"

"No!" Eric yelled back. Then he put his head down again. "I got rid of Tray" he said. "You should be happy for that."

"He was talking to you anyway. If you left the bedroom, I might get left in peace."

"That mince is OK, isn't it Mum?" Sam yelled from the hallway.

"Yeah, it was from last night" I called back.

"See, they need you more" Eric said.

"No, no. Sorting out fights and allocating TV time is definitely your area of expertise. Plus, you realise that's your leftover nacho mince they're eating."

"What?" Eric said. "Oh…fuck. They eat every fucking thing."

"Well, it's the competition for scarce resources, Eric. Leftovers are scarce, so it's first in, gets mince on toast for breakfast."

Eric sighed, rolled onto his back, and then finally got out of bed and went into the bathroom. "Mum!" Felicia shouted. "Mum, Sam's using all the mince."

"Dad's on his way" I called back, and then I closed my eyes and wished for peace and quiet.

It was never going to happen.

EPOV

The kids were fucking annoying at times, and somehow it was worse in this house because it was smaller and everyone was getting on everyone else's nerves.

"Did you guys leave any of the leftovers?" I asked, and Sam shook his head. Fuck, they ate everything in sight while annoying each other. Loudly. With much screaming. It was like living with a bunch of permanently hungry and belligerent chimpanzees sometimes.

I started making coffee, hoping that might persuade Sookie to leave the bedroom, and Pam put down her yoghurt pot and bounced over. "So can I go and ask Miriam now?" she asked.

"Ask Miriam what?"

"If she wants to go to the pools with me?"

"I think you mean go with _me_" Felicia said from the corner of the kitchen where she was lurking and eating toast smeared in a thick layer of peanut butter. "I'm the one going to the pools."

"But she doesn't like you" Pam said, whirling around to face her. "She likes me."

"Uh-huh. But maybe if she knew me she'd like me better" Felicia said with a shrug and a smirk.

Pam looked horrified. "No!" she said, stamping her foot. "No, that's not how it works. She likes me! Just me! You can't have her! She's my friend!" And then she ran out of the room.

"Wow. She's really touchy about having a friend" Felicia said.

"It's not really nice to tease her, Leesh" I pointed out. Although Pam did seem overly sensitive about Miriam. I wasn't sure that was good. I'd have to ask Sookie about it.

"Did you make poor Pam cry?" Amelia demanded, as she arrived in the kitchen.

Felicia shrugged. Sam said "Yeah she did." Felicia lunged for Sam, he dodged, a big dollop of the minced beef slid off the toast he was holding and onto the floor and we all stared at it.

"I miss Ivan" Sam said. "Tray, you'll have to eat it."

"I'm not eating floor-mince!" Tray complained.

"Three-second rule is nearly up" Felicia said. "Come on." She clicked her fingers. "Chop-chop, Tray."

"I'm not eating it!" Tray said, looking from Sam to Felicia and back again. "Do I have to eat it, Dad?"

"No, but someone had better clean it up" I said.

"Well, it's not my mince" Tray said.

"It's not my fault I dropped it" Sam said, glaring at Felicia.

"I didn't do anything!" Felicia said.

"So, no one cares that Pam is crying?" Amelia asked.

"Oh, what happened here?" Sookie said, as she walked in and saw the mince on the floor. She grabbed a paper towel and wiped it up while the kids stood around and watched her.

"Way to go, guys" I said to them.

"What? What'd we do?" Tray asked.

"It's more what you didn't do" I said to him, as the coffee finally started to drip through the machine.

"I don't have to eat floor-mince!" Tray yelled. "It's not a rule!"

"No, don't eat things that have been on the floor Tray" Sookie said mildly, as she put the paper towel in the trash.

"You ate a cicada once" Sam said to him.

Tray shrugged. "You dared me to."

"Pam's upset. Felicia said something" Amelia complained to Sookie.

"What about?" Sookie asked, bringing two cups over to where I was standing beside the coffeemaker.

"Don't know. But I want coffee too."

"Get a cup then" I said to her, and she stood there looking at me like I was speaking gibberish. Eventually she opened the cupboard Sookie had just been looking in and pulled one out.

"So, Pam's upset?" Sookie asked.

"She thought I want to steal her friend" Felicia said, shrugging. She picked up her plate and started walking towards the trash with it. Fuck, she wasted food; there was still peanut butter on some of those crusts. I reached over and took one off the plate and bit into it. It was fine.

"I don't have to steal her friends" Felicia grumbled, as she turned around and put the plate next to me on the kitchen counter. "I can get my own friends. There you go, Dad. You can finish up my leftovers."

"Well, don't throw out good toast, Felicia."

"I don't like crusts." She shrugged.

"We _should_ be composting them" Amelia said, and then she turned to Felicia. "You're not _that_ great you know. Just because, like, some boys asked you to go to the pools with them. They might not be there. Or, like, they might be making fun of you or something."

"Nah" Felicia said. "I got a text from Joey before. He said they'd be there at eleven."

"OH MY GOD!" Amelia yelled. "You are…you are…you are just…nrrrgh! I don't even know what you are. But I'm sick of it!" And then she stomped off.

"Poor Amelia" Sookie murmured.

"Why poor her?" Felicia asked. "I'm the one they all yell at. That's not fair for a start." And then she walked out of the kitchen.

"Girls are loud" Tray said. "What's for breakfast?"

"You had breakfast" Sookie said, as I handed her the coffee I'd poured. I looked at the third cup. Would Amelia come back for her coffee anytime soon? Fuck it. She could pour it herself.

"No" Tray said. "I had leftovers. That's helpful. Like Dad eating the toast crusts up."

"Well there's no fucking minced beef left" I pointed out.

"It's not compulsory to eat every scrap of food you come across, you know?" Sookie said. She was looking at me when she said it, which was kind of pointless when she was trying to let Tray know not to eat everything he saw.

But then there were more shouts from down the hallway. "Now you're just being nice, Felicia! Stop being nice!" Amelia shouted.

Felicia stomped in. "I said to her if she came, that would be OK, but now she's in a big snot and I don't know why! I didn't do anything. It's not my fault she didn't come to the supermarket. And it was a stupid supermarket too! Why am I the one she's shouting at?" Felicia looked at me plaintively. I had no fucking clue. I got the feeling this was one Sookie would have to deal with.

"She's jealous" Sookie said, after I gave her a 'please handle this' look.

"NO I'M NOT!" Amelia screamed, which suggested she was lurking just outside. There was the sound of footsteps down the hall and a door slammed.

"She is" Sookie whispered.

"Why?" Felicia said.

"Because those boys wanted you there" Sookie said, as she grabbed a loaf of bread and put some slices in the toaster. Fucking terrific, I was getting toast.

"So?" Felicia asked. "They'll just look at her boobs probably and not care if I'm there."

Fuck. Not what I wanted to hear, or even think about. I wondered if it was too late to ban them all from going to the swimming pool.

"That's gross!" Tray said, which kind of echoed my thoughts. "I don't want to look at anyone's boobs." Yeah…that one he might recant later on, although I doubted he'd be interested in Amelia's at any point in the future.

Fuck. It was still wrong that Amelia had them. Really that gene could have died out with Sookie as far as I was concerned.

"They're OK" Sam said, shrugging. Probably he was trying to be diplomatic and not offend Sookie. And then he realised what he'd said, and he went bright red.

"Pervert" Felicia said to him.

"Be nice" Sookie warned.

"What's the point? Everyone yells at me anyway. I said she could come too, but no, she'd rather stay here and read those books with the naked guys' chests on the cover. Ugh. I don't get that."

"You don't like guys?" Sookie asked, and Felicia gave her a weird look. "No, naked guys' chests are fine, Mum. I just don't get the books" Felicia said. I wished hard for a fucking pair of earmuffs, but none materialised. Definitely I was banning the swimming pool trip.

"Well, that's no reason to be mean to Amelia" Sookie said, as the toast popped up and she put two slices on a plate for me.

"There's no more peanut butter" Felicia added as an aside. Fuck, really? And they wondered why I ate the fucking crusts.

"You guys need to start putting stuff on the shopping list _before_ it all gets used up" Sookie said, as she pulled out some jelly. "Ugh" she said, and she put it back, before finding some jam. Yes, they did. They also needed to stop growing boobs, looking at naked guys and eating all my fucking leftovers.

It wasn't too much to ask, was it?

"So it's just toast for breakfast?" Tray asked, coming over to see what I was doing as I spread the unwanted jelly on my toast.

"You ate your breakfast. Leave mine alone" I said to him.

"I wasn't being mean to Amelia!" Felicia said, picking up the thread of the previous conversation. "I was being nice, but no one likes it if I'm nice, so what's the point of being nice? I won't bother being nice to anyone then!"

"You're not nice to me" Sam pointed out.

"That's because you're an annoying little shit" she hissed at him.

"You" I said to her. "Are washing the Corvette later on."

Felicia looked at me. "I hate this family!" she said, and she left the kitchen again.

"How come she gets to do that?" Tray whined. "Felicia gets all the good stuff!"

"But she sucks at _Need for Speed_" Sam pointed out, and Tray smiled. "Yeah, she does" he agreed. "She sucks big-time."

"So, you want more toast, Tray?" Sookie asked.

"Yep" he said, going over to stand beside her at the toaster. Sam looked out the window. "Hey" he said. "Is Pam supposed to be going over to Miriam's house? With her suitcase?"

Fuck.

**A/N The Gold Coast is in Queensland, Australia. It's a rather popular tourist destination for Kiwis (only a 3 hour flight from Auckland), and many people do retire over there, or just move over there too.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	38. Chapter 38

**A/N I may have posted this earlier, but I tried to write some of it sitting on the couch with the laptop on my lap...and the cat lying across my hand on the mouse with his head on the keyboard. He makes life difficult sometimes!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, not ever.**

SPOV

Eric managed to go from eating toast and drinking coffee to out the back door in one pretty fluid movement. "Dad went out" Tray commented to me, in case I'd blinked and missed it.

"Yeah" I agreed.

"Dad's talking to Pam" Sam said, from his spot looking out the window. "Well…I think there's shouting" he amended. I knew there was shouting. I could hear it. I thought the whole neighbourhood could probably hear it.

I was glad I lived in another country.

I sighed, and took Tray's toast out of the toaster. The problem with shouting at Pam was that Pam shouted back. And she wouldn't back down. Shouting at Pam was totally the wrong approach to the situation.

But that had never stopped Eric yet.

"What do you want on your toast?" I asked Tray.

"Peanut butter" he replied, looking not at me but the direction of the yelling.

"There isn't any, anything else?" I tried.

"Marmite."

"Wrong hemisphere."

"What?"

"There isn't any."

Tray sighed, loudly. "The jam. Without the lumps."

"Jelly" I supplied.

"What? No, jam. But the stuff without lumps."

"Yeah, that's jelly." Tray just kept looking at me like I had a screw loose. "Dad's coming ba…" Sam said, but then he hustled away from the back door and closer to where Tray and I were standing around the toaster. I didn't think the toaster was going to save us.

"You can't just bring me back inside!" Pam yelled, which was a bit daft, because Eric had just proved that he could do just that, by picking her up and carrying her. Maybe she was worrying more about the morality of just picking someone up and moving them, but that probably wasn't going to wash either. Eric was kind of big on the whole 'while you live under my roof you do as I say' party line. He put both Pam down on the floor.

"You can't just wander into people's houses and demand refuge!" Eric yelled back.

"I was visiting! My friend!" Pam yelled. I passed Tray his toast. "See?" he whispered. "Not jelly, Mum."

"You do not go visiting at eight in the morning with a suitcase, Pam" Eric explained, kind of loudly, and with a reasonable amount of pointing.

"You left my suitcase outside!" Pam yelled, completely missing the point.

"I was tempted to leave you outside, but you'd just go next door" Eric said to her.

"Like Bella does" Sam whispered to me. "She likes Mrs Bodehouse's house. And the fish pond." Oh, well at least I knew where Bella was getting her extra love and attention from, but that didn't solve the Pam problem.

"But I want to go next door!" Pam whined. "Miriam's there and it's nice. Nicer than here!"

"Pamela, you cannot simply march next door and assume you can intrude on their breakfast."

"I wasn't 'truding!" Pam complained. "I was _visiting_! With my friend! She likes me! You hate me and I hate you!"

"Don't say that!" Eric roared, as I huddled closer to the toaster wishing I knew what to do with the pair of them. Tray and Sam had been enjoying watching it all unfold up until now, but I think even they were starting to get a bit wary of what was going to happen next. Tray got so close he stood on my foot. I wasn't sure I felt up to protecting them all, and I really wanted to step in and pull Pam out of the fray about now, but I couldn't imagine her thanking me for it.

If only it had been like the time I found Bob on the back deck growling at the black cat from over the back. I'd held the doormat between them and both cats had promptly given up the idea of a fight and gone home, satisfied that the threat had been satisfactorily dealt with once they couldn't see that interloper anymore. It had worked a treat.

I would have picked up the kitchen rug, but Eric was standing on it. So…bugger. New plan was required then.

I just couldn't think of one.

"Don't say things you don't mean, Pam" Eric warned.

"I do mean it!" Pam announced. "I mean it and it's _true_! You're so mean to me! I didn't get to have a nana, and now you don't want me to have a friend either! And you won't take me to Disneyland! Why did I have to come here, if you won't let me have anything good? Everyone else gets what they want, but NOT ME! I NEVER get what I want; I only get what no one else wants. MY LIFE SUCKS!"

Eric opened his mouth, presumably to list all the reasons why Pam's life didn't suck, or possibly just tell her that's the way it was, but Pam ran off down the hall and I heard Felicia say "What do you want?" when Pam went into their shared room.

That just made Eric look even more furious, if such a thing was actually possible. I pretended I couldn't hear Tray whisper "Do you think Dad got that mad when he killed that guy?" to Sam.

"Maybe it's a good idea to just leave her" I said to Eric. He wasn't really listening to me, though. He was staring in the direction Pam had fled. I was struggling to work out where Eric's anger over the whole situation had come from. After all, it wasn't like Immanuel hadn't appeared in the garden of this house on more than one occasion since we'd been here.

Although he hadn't brought a suitcase with him, I guessed.

Eric didn't really reply, just shrugged and mumbled something about a shower, before leaving the room. I finished up my toast and collected up all the discarded plates and cups littered around the kitchen. Eric's toast was still sitting half-eaten on his plate. That was odd.

Tray went off to, presumably, use the PlayStation again and only Sam was left with me. "I don't know why everyone has to fight all the time" he grumbled. "It's no fun."

"No" I agreed. "It isn't." And then he ran off to fight with Tray over the PlayStation. I finished cleaning up and headed to the ensuite to see if there was enough room left over for me to brush my teeth. And then maybe I'd just get in the car and drive to Disneyland myself.

I probably wouldn't, but right at that moment, it was a pretty entertaining daydream.

EPOV

I stepped out of the shower and couldn't go anywhere because the ensuite was kind of small and Sookie was now stationed in front of the sink brushing her teeth, quite vigorously. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because it had a knock-on effect of making her boobs in her pyjama top shake quite pleasingly. Although after a few seconds of watching the jiggling I realised that it might be due to the fact that Sookie was pissed with me as well.

So that was fucking fantastic. It was bad enough that Pam had refused point-blank to fucking come back inside the house, but now Sookie was annoyed too. And none of it was my fucking fault.

Eventually, or all too soon, depending on whether I was thinking about the cause of the jiggling, or simply enjoying the visual, Sookie stopped brushing. "What?" she asked.

"I was just waiting" I said.

Sookie sighed. "Everyone's grumpy" she said. "I'm fed up with the grumpiness, quite frankly."

Well, I wasn't grumpy. With anyone. I was pissed that Pam thought she had a right to march over to the neighbours' house and declare herself in need of refuge, but I wasn't grumpy with anyone.

The kids were pretty fucking grumpy though. It was a probably a good thing they were getting out of the house to go to the swimming pool today.

"So I guess I'm on pool duty?" Sookie said, as she grabbed a towel and moved around me to get to the shower.

"Yeah, I had better go and um…" Fuck. What was it I had to do? There was a lot, but I couldn't really articulate all the individual items at the moment. It was more like a huge weight pressing on me than an ordered sequence of events.

"Find out if we can rent one of those big bins. Start pulling the stuff out and chucking it or donating it somewhere. Sell the cars" Sookie supplied.

"Yeah" I agreed. "That." I didn't want to do any of it. How did I know what the fuck to keep? None of it was my shit. Well, some of it was, I guessed. Although anything that had once been mine now appeared to belong to Sam and Tray, while I got lumbered with the crap Dad hadn't been bothered to throw away in the last forty years. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Sookie switched on the water and stepped into the shower. "So you're OK?" she asked. "With all of that?"

"Yep" I said, hoping that covered it. I wasn't really. And I was fucking annoyed with Pam. But I was kind of stuck with all of it, having to deal with the detritus of Dad's life and the stubborn streak Pam had inherited from her mother.

"Well, you'll have to tell me where I'm going then, on this trip to the pools."

"Mmm" I said, as I looked in the mirror and contemplated whether or not I needed to shave. Probably not. There had to be some perks to living here.

SPOV

Eric was quiet, which was a nice change after all the yelling earlier, but it was slightly worrying. I knew that he didn't want to deal with the house, got the feeling that if he could he'd just lock the door behind him and go back to New Zealand. But life didn't work like that, and he didn't have a choice.

And because he didn't have a choice about that, poor Pam hadn't had much of a choice about going to visit Miriam that morning. Or moving in with Miriam, I still wasn't completely clear what her intentions were and, to be honest, I was too chicken to ask her in case she was going to yell at me too.

You'd think five kids in, I wouldn't be scared of the five year old, but it was Pam, and it paid to be cautious.

So I thought that if I just got them all to the pools, it would be OK. Kids would stop fighting and complaining and everyone would get on like a house on fire, and meanwhile Eric would start to get his act together and clear out the house.

But it didn't work out quite that way.

Pam sulked the entire way there. "I don't know why Daddy is so mean" she complained. "Why is he so mean to me? I just wanted to be with my friend."

"Shut up about your friend!" Amelia exploded.

"Just because no one here cares about you" Felicia muttered.

"You're still not that special because a boy said he'd be at the pools" Amelia said.

"What boy?" Tray asked. "That kid from next door?"

"Why is Immanuel allowed to come if Miriam isn't?" Pam yelled.

"He's not" I tried to say, but Amelia just talked over me. "These are some _boys_ who think Felicia's hot and want to hang with her."

"No they don't" Felicia muttered. "They were just trying to be nice."

"Hot?" Tray asked.

"Yeah, like, um…you know. They want to kiss her. And stuff" Sam supplied.

"No they don't!" Felicia said, punching Sam on the leg. "Ow!" he complained.

"Euw" Tray said. "Who'd want to kiss Felicia? Ow! Fuck off, Leesh."

"No!" Felicia cried. "You fuck off. All of you. Fuck off out of my business. Just because I met some other kids, it doesn't mean ANYTHING. It's just…it's just…"

"Well it's not because you have, like, boobs or anything" Amelia supplied.

"Why does everyone keep talking about boobs?" Tray asked.

"I have a friend too! But no one cares about my friend. Only Felicia's friends!" Pam yelled.

"Everybody, settle down!" I called out. "Or I'll pull over and leave you all…somewhere…"

"No you won't" Sam said confidently.

"I might" I said. "You lot are really annoying."

"Nope" Sam insisted. "You always say that kids are too hard to make so you're not replacing anyone." Bugger. I hated it when they remembered what you'd said at other times and used it against you.

"That's when we wanted to take the net off the trampoline" Tray mused in a voice which suggested I ruined all their fun. They'd wanted the net off so they could jump from the garage roof onto the trampoline. They were out of luck on that front. "Well…OK" I conceded. "But you still have to behave in the car. Or I will turn around and go back to the house."

Amelia sighed. "I knew this whole trip was going to be a bummer" she muttered.

"She wouldn't leave us" Tray stated. "Because then what would she do?" I could think of quite a few things I could do with myself if I didn't have kids around, but before I could list them all, Sam decided he might answer for me. "Well, you know. Hang out with Dad, I guess."

"Well…but she didn't make him" Tray pointed out. "So you know, I don't think that'd be the same. She'd be bored."

"That's why Dad has to come home early on Fridays, sometimes" Pam added. "So Mum's not bored. It's boring by yourself. It's better with friends." She sighed.

"So, see? She wouldn't leave us. She'd be lonely" Sam said.

I couldn't decide if having them talk about me like I wasn't there was an improvement or not on fighting amongst themselves. There was less hitting, so that was better, but realising my children thought I'd be lost without them and reduced to following Eric around in the hope he might have a conversation with me kind of sucked.

Although when I thought about it myself, it would be weird without them all crowding up the house and creating mountains of laundry and mess. And needing food every five minutes. What would that be like? I had vague memories of a time in the past when my life had been like that. But it was a very distant past now. Even trying to remember life with just one or two kids was a bit of a struggle.

"OK, we're here" I said, pulling into the carpark. It was probably too much to expect gratitude. After all, in the kids' world-view this was what I was here for, to run them around and pick up after them.

"Hey Mum?" Tray said, as everyone slowly got out of the van. "You're just going to sit on the side, eh? And watch? And not go in?"

Yep, definitely that was what I was here for. To sit on the side-lines and not embarrass anyone. Oh, and provide the snacks judging by the way Tray was now digging around in my bag.

I never thought I'd miss the days when I had all the kids under-foot and reluctant to leave my side. But it was starting to look like I just might.

EPOV

The house got very, very quiet when Sookie and the kids left. I hated it when it was this quiet; I hated it in this house, anyway. It was always too fucking quiet.

So I made some calls about getting a dumpster delivered, and I called around to see if any of the car dealers around would be interested in the Corvette. Some guy said he was, and I offered to bring it in to show him. Well, he suggested he call in on his way home, but it seemed like a good idea to get the ball rolling. So I said I'd take it along later in the day, after Felicia had washed it.

Those things didn't take me all that long though, so I thought about my next task. I drove into town and picked up some boxes from the UPS store. I figured some of this crap was going home with me.

The rest, well…fuck. I got some trash bags out of the kitchen and walked into the bedroom. It was still Dad's room really. It always fucking would be. I could strip it bare and it would still be his room.

I realised I was spending far too much time thinking and not enough time doing. I missed Sookie. She was great at the doing-type stuff. I contemplated leaving it all until she was back from swimming with the kids. She'd know what to keep and what to put in the trash and it would mean I wouldn't have to look through it all again, dredge everything back up.

But that wasn't really fair on her. Although I did think that having to do it wasn't really fucking fair on me either. Why should I have to deal with Dad's shit? Why should I have to get rid of…I pulled a box out of the closet…thirty fucking years of bank statements and tax returns. At least that's what it looked like was in here. What did you do with that stuff?

I put it in a trash bag. So that was a start.

And then I went to get some coffee. It was going to be a fucking long day.

SPOV

The kids at least got to spread out a bit at the swimming pool, and I think they needed it. Tray and Sam stuck together and managed to find some other boys to hang out with. I could see the splashing and no one seemed to be drowning, so I left them to it. Pam hung around with me for a little while, until, Miriam turned up. "I texted her. From Leesh's phone" Pam whispered to me, when Miriam came in smiling and waving, as though Eric might magically overhear her and yell at her again.

"Um…OK" I said, thinking it might have been nice to have been asked before I'd had another kid dumped on me. Just because I had five didn't mean I necessarily wanted six, but somehow that's what most other parents seemed to think.

So Pam and Miriam were happy, and seemed to spend most of their time sitting on the edge of the pool whispering to each other. Felicia seemed happy, although it was hard to tell, as every so often you'd hear her yell "Stop being a doofus, Bryan!", or "Yeah, right!" and she'd maybe punch one of the boys she was with. I could hear them teasing her about her accent too, there seemed to be a spate of them all yelling "Yeah, nah!" like it was the most hilarious expression ever. But Felicia didn't seem to mind, she took it all in her stride. I wondered where all that confidence came from.

And I could tell that Amelia did too. She hung out with me, under a sun umbrella and it took a long time for her to feel confident enough to remove the sarong she had tied tightly around her orange and white hibiscus print bikini. I'd tried to tell her that she looked lovely, but all I got was a glare, so I gave up. No good telling her that by the time she got to my age and had to buy swimsuits from that place in Greenwood's Corner that specialised in lingerie for women with larger busts, she'd regret not spending enough time parading around in just a bikini.

So instead we both sat and watched Felicia, who had somehow managed to pair a green and navy striped tankini top with black and pink floral bikini bottoms and pull the whole look off, and wished for her confidence.

EPOV

By the time Sookie got home with the kids, I hadn't sorted through much more of the stuff. I had drunk three cups of coffee, worried about Pam,reversed the Corvette into the driveway so Felicia could clean it, finished up the bag of cookies that was sitting on the kitchen counter, watched Miriam and her mother leave their house, replied to some client emails, checked the New Zealand news websites, checked the weather forecast for Auckland, and played just one game on the PlayStation. Just so I could keep my hand in for when the boys wanted to play with me.

And then Sookie arrived back with the kids, and the house filled up with noise again. "I don't want to talk to you!" Amelia yelled at someone. Probably Felicia.

"You could have come over! We weren't being snobby!" Felicia yelled. Yep, so they were at it again.

"I'm hungry" Tray announced, as he walked into the living room and looked at me. And then I think he realised his mistake, and he walked out again. I could hear him repeating "I'm hungry" to Sookie in the hallway.

"I bought you something for lunch. You can have fruit" Sookie said.

Tray made an annoyed noise and then Sookie appeared. "Did you eat lunch?" she asked. I shrugged. There'd been the cookies, but they weren't really lunch. It just felt a bit shitty eating by myself though.

"Mum!" Sam yelled. "Mum! I don't know where my shorts are!"

Sookie disappeared again, before I really had a chance to talk to her. Pam came in, and pointedly walked right across the living room and into the kitchen with her nose in the air, not looking at me. Fuck, she was a pain in the ass. She just didn't get that I was the parent and I made the rules and one of those rules was to not go and fucking annoy the neighbours first thing in the fucking morning.

"Do I have to wash it now?" Felicia asked, as she came in.

"Might as well" I said. "You can get changed first though." She was still in her swimsuit.

"No point" Felicia said. "It's hot and I have to work the hose. I'll just keep this on."

"Alright" I agreed. "Stuff's in the garage."

Felicia walked out again and I was alone in the living room.

SPOV

When we got back there was the usual chaos as everyone tried to figure out what do next, when we were eating next and the complaints of boredom, hunger and lost property kept me busy.

And when I made it into the bedroom Eric and I were using I realised he hadn't actually achieved a lot while we were out which partially negated the reason for taking the kids out in the first place. I'd thought that being here by himself he'd get stuck in and everything would get sorted out, but it was still all here, and the one bin-liner by the bed which now held some paper wasn't really much of an achievement on Eric's part.

"Um…" I said when Eric came in to stand beside me. "Um…so…we're going to carry on with this then?"

Eric shrugged, and looked a little forlorn. Just like Tray did when I told him to go and find his school uniform fleece and he had no idea where he'd left it.

"OK" I said, "Let's, um…well…" I tried to think of the best plan.

"Do you want to have a cup of coffee first?" Eric asked. I looked at him. How on earth did I end up in charge of Operation Clear out the Crap?

"No" I said. "No. Here's what we'll do. You pull the stuff out of the wardrobe and start binning it or boxing it, and I'll get the boys started on the stuff they want to keep, OK?"

Eric shrugged, and looked at the wardrobe like it might harbour monsters. Pam came in "Mum, can I…" she said, and then she stopped when she saw Eric, turned on her heel and marched out again. Crap. That was the next problem. Eric pretended he hadn't seen her and went back to staring at the wardrobe.

"Start with the clothes" I said to him. "Put them all in a bin-liner and they can go to charity along with the furniture." I grabbed a couple of boxes and walked into the boys' room. "Tray, you can't spend all afternoon in your underwear" I said, and he reluctantly grabbed his shorts and put them on.

"OK" I said, holding up the boxes. "These are your boxes. What you can fit in them, you can keep, so choose wisely and pack carefully."

"You're not packing it up?" Tray asked, looking at his box.

"Nope. That's all you guys. Right, get to it." I walked back to the bedroom and found Eric still in place. "Just pull the stuff off the hangers and chuck it in a bag, Eric" I said, as I grabbed another box.

"What?" Amelia said grumpily, when I walked in.

"This box is yours, pack into it all the stuff you want, and you can take it home."

"Can I take the books home?" Amelia asked, perking up a bit.

"Yep, fine." We really didn't need them, but at least it would keep her occupied.

Eric was gone from the bedroom when I got back. He was now at the front door watching Felicia, who had the hose in one hand and was talking to some kid on a bike. "So, is that your car?" he asked her.

"My dad's" she said. "For now. I have to wash it though, which majorly sucks."

"Cool" the kid said.

"Why is that cool? It's a freaking punishment" Felicia said to him.

"Do you think she should have changed?" Eric hissed to me.

"Well it's kind of practical to wear a swimsuit, I guess. I used to clean Dad's car in my bikini all the time when I was a teenager. And I'd help Mum in the garden wearing it. I'd hope I was getting a tan in the process." Eric gave me a funny look, which I didn't think was related to my not very safe tanning practices as a teenager and stalked off. I wondered if I should go and direct him back to the task he was meant to be doing, but then Amelia appeared at my elbow. "So, I can have, like, anything…oh, who's she talking to _now_?" she said.

"I don't know" I said. "But he seems mostly to be impressed with the Corvette."

"Well, that's just dumb. Boys are dumb" Amelia said dismissively, while biting her lip and staring daggers at Felicia.

"Yeah, I'm eleven dude" Felicia said to the guy.

Next to me I felt Amelia stiffen. "This is just…" she said. I never got to find out exactly what it was, because she marched out the door and down the front steps to Felicia. "Dad says" she announced. "That I have to help too."

"What'd you do?" Felicia asked, and Amelia looked momentarily stumped.

"I have no idea" she said. "Sometimes, Dad's just mean for no reason."

"Yeah" Felicia said. "Well, you can wash with the stuff in the bucket, now I've hosed it down." Amelia smiled at the kid who was still just standing there and walked around to where there was a bucket of soapy water and picked up the sponge that was floating in it. And when she turned around to face Felicia again, Felicia sprayed her with the hose. "Don't do that!" Amelia yelled at her. She still had her togs on too, but she'd put a tank-top and shorts on over the bikini and the top was now soaked.

Felicia cackled evilly, as Amelia chucked the sponge at her and missed by a mile. "Not funny" she said, and then she pulled the tank-top off. The kid on the bike went a funny colour. I wondered if he'd ever be inclined to go home. He seemed to like it here despite the fact Felicia and Amelia were completely ignoring him now, locked in their own battle. "Stop splashing me!" Amelia yelled.

"No" Felicia called back. "It's fun!"

Eric walked around the side of the house to the driveway. Guess that answered my question about whether he was actually doing anything with the stuff in the bedroom. He was kind of a funny colour too, now. "Stop wasting fucking water and get on with it!" he yelled, and the kid on the bike took off in a hurry. So that was one problem down, which just left me with clearing out the house and getting Pam and Eric to start liking each other again. I knew which one was going to be easier, so I walked back to the bedroom to make a start on it myself. Maybe Pam would get a personality transplant while I had a look at what was lurking under the bed?

EPOV

I wasn't sure at what point I started fucking living in the Playboy mansion, but I was pretty sure that washing the Corvette was supposed to be a punishment, not entertainment for all the horny teenagers in the fucking neighbourhood.

At home, we had a fucking big wall. And a gate that went right across the driveway. A nice solid wood gate that, when closed, blocked the view of anything going on in the driveway. Like girls washing cars in bikinis. Thank fuck for that, because quite frankly, once was enough and I never, ever needed to see some kid standing around watching my daughters spraying each other with water again. From now on they were only washing cars in the middle of fucking winter, wearing sweaters and hats.

Once the kid had fucked off though, and Amelia and Felicia had settled down to wash the car, I realised I couldn't put it off any longer and I really had to go and deal with the bedroom. Or maybe just watch Sookie while she did it.

But when I got there, Sookie was staring at a box like it was something she wished she hadn't seen. Fuck. It was really not my fucking day.

**Thanks for reading!**


	39. Chapter 39

**A/N So yeah, I have been a bit busy here creating a glitter-filled princess party for my daughter who then started school (as you do here as soon as you turn five). The first day she brought home her reader and then we filled out the little book to say she'd read it at home, and the kids get to draw a face to show if they liked the book; they put either a smile, or a frown etc in the face. Then she announced she was starting a notebook whereby she'd be drawing faces after each dinner to show whether she liked it or not, and, luckily, last night's effort garnered a smiley face. Lucky old me. It's like being on MasterChef, only the judges are harsher and less inclined to eat anything considered too 'flavoury'. Sigh.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I knew there was a reason that I wasn't supposed to be the one clearing this room out. I didn't need to find any of Stan's hidden treasures, I felt pretty certain about that.

I'd pulled the box out from under the bed and put it on top, but then I wasn't really sure what to do with it next. It wasn't exactly something we were going to be shipping home as a family heirloom, after all.

Eric walked in while I was still stuck staring at the contents of the box. He came over to peer into it as well. "Um…" he said, clearly a bit confused by the whole thing.

"Yeah" I said. "I know. Ick. I found where your dad kept, his, uh…porn."

"Mmm" Eric said, thoughtfully. He was probably thinking he didn't want to see it either. Some things you just didn't need to know about your parents, after all. And I guess there had been those times Stan was between girlfriends.

Oh, that was really, really icky. I needed to shut my brain down, right now.

I sighed. "At least it wasn't anywhere the kids found it, I guess. It's bad enough that Amelia found those books in the bedroom she's in…"

"Because that's more your kind of porn, isn't it Sookie?" Eric asked.

"No. Euw. Still doesn't help with this. I guess we'll need another bin liner and then we can put it in the pile of stuff to get thrown out."

"Uh-huh" Eric agreed, looking round for one. I assumed, anyway. It was hard to tell with him at that point in time, he was a bit all over the place.

"But this doesn't fit in the box!" Tray complained, as he walked in the door of the bedroom brandishing a skateboard. He just about collected Eric with it as he came marching over to me. "So the box doesn't work!"

"Watch out" I warned, and Tray looked at me kind of blankly. Sometimes the kids forgot that stuff didn't just magically bounce off Eric, I think. Although he wasn't above pretending to be invincible from time to time, if it suited his own purposes. But I didn't need him injured right then, not when I needed him to actually focus on clearing out Stan's stuff.

"So I need a bigger box" Tray announced.

"I do too" Sam said from behind him. Eric muttered something in the background that sounded like a lot of 'fucks' strung together in an attempt to form a sentence. Actually, that's probably what it was, exactly.

"I don't know where you put them" I said to Eric. "I've only seen the one that the clothes were going into, and that one with the papers. Maybe try behind those boxes."

"I didn't put any boxes anywhere" Tray said, assuming I was talking to him. "But I want a bigger one." He held the skateboard up again, just so I could understand the problem fully.

"No, there are no bigger boxes" I explained to Tray. "Just, um, well…" Eric was looking at me, like I had the answer to everything. Tray was looking at me with the exact same expression. I looked out the window and watched Pam and Miriam link arms and go in the back door of Miriam's house. I bet it was nice over there. I bet there were tea-parties. I could just go a nice tea-party about then, and Pam did know how to throw a good one. We'd had a lot of them when she'd been at home with me before she started school. I kind of missed them; it was nice to just switch off and be a bit-player in Pam's drama for a while. Or I could go and hang out with the big girls, and wash a car in my togs. That had been a lot of fun when I was their age.

I turned back to look at Eric. "Don't know" I said to him, shrugging. It was a less than acceptable answer given the way his expression changed. I hated to disappoint him, but I really wasn't the oracle of every household item. Eric muttered "Maybe there's some in the kitchen still" and left the room.

Sam poked Tray in the back. "You keep falling off it, anyway. What's the point of keeping it?"

"I might get better" Tray said, shrugging. Well, he might. He really wasn't the most graceful of kids. I glanced again at the skateboard and wondered how many times Eric had fallen off it before he'd canned the idea of skateboarding; it still looked pretty new.

"But you're kind of shit at it now" Sam reminded him.

"Well...you want to take the guns home" Tray said in retaliation, trying to shift focus to Sam's plans for shipping stuff home.

"I think they'll fit in the boxes if we take them apart" Sam said, shrugging.

"Yeah…I don't know that I'm that keen on shipping things that look like weapons home" I said. The pirate swords that had come home from Disneyland in our luggage had been enough of a pain; I could see these boxes getting confiscated, and then Eric being detained…

"There are no more" Eric announced, coming back into the room. "So I don't know what happened to the ones that were here earlier." He looked at me, the clear implication being that I'd hidden them somewhere. OK, so the part where they detained Eric might be nice for five minutes.

"Where did you put them when you brought them in here?" I asked Eric, as he ran his hand through his hair and looked perplexed by it all.

"They were on the bed" Eric said. "I am sure…no, certain, that they were on the bed. And I took one and started putting papers in it, and then you took one and said put clothes in it, and then they just disappeared."

"Nothing just disappears, Eric" I said, and he looked at me like I was silly. I could never get anyone to believe me on that point; they'd just throw up their hands and cry "It's lost! Forever!" and fall into a great funk of hopelessness, and then I would have to track whatever it was down and point out that things didn't get lost, just misplaced. You had to really be trying to lose stuff. After all, we still had Tray.

"So, Mum! Mum! I need another box, 'cos maybe if I tape two boxes together, the skateboard will fit."

Eric stopped looking for bin liners and looked at Tray instead. "You're, uh…are you sure about the skateboard?" he asked Tray, which I think was a kind way of paraphrasing Sam's comment about Tray's skateboarding prowess from earlier.

"Yes!" Tray said, emphatically, while clutching the skateboard to his chest. "But I need a bigger box, and Mum won't give me one!"

"I don't have any bigger boxes" I pointed out.

"We don't have any trash bags either, apparently" Eric said to Tray, the clear implication being I'd stuffed that one up too. Tray looked just as perplexed as Eric had been; he wasn't really in the right space to understand his father's frustrations. "I just need a box" he said, looking from Eric, to me, and back again.

"What are you guys doing?" Immanuel asked as he walked into the room with us all. Fair enough, I thought, everyone else just waltzed on in here, why not Immanuel too. Eric didn't bat an eyelid, which made me even more curious what all that yelling at Pam had been about that morning.

And then Eric did notice Immanuel. "Why are you wearing a trash bag?" he asked, sharply.

"It's a costume" Immanuel explained. "Pam and Miriam made it. They made a few, but this was the best. Well, they said it was. I don't like it. I don't want to play with them anymore. What are you guys doing?" He looked at Sam expectantly.

"You look kind of stink" Sam said to him, and I think the term confused Immanuel, because he just looked down at the bin liner he was wearing and shrugged. "I dunno what I'm meant to be" he said. "I was the bad guy, and there were too many rules. I don't like playing with girls. They have a lot of rules. And they kept chasing me."

"Oh, for fuck's sake" Eric muttered, looking out the window at Pam and Miriam who were now back in Miriam's garden, running around. Pam appeared to be wearing a rather nice two piece outfit made out of a bin-liner and waving some kind of plastic sword above her head, while making a weird, keening noise. Was she meant to be Xena, I wondered? When the hell had she seen the show?

"That's just fucking typical" Eric complained. "You can't put a goddamned thing down in this house without someone else thinking it's their own personal fucking property."

"But I get to keep the skateboard!" Tray yelled.

"Your other sisters are washing the Corvette" Immanuel informed him. "How come they get the good stuff?"

"I get nothing good…or fun…or, or, or…sweet, or anything!" Tray grumbled.

"Pam says that too" Sam said. "But then, she's a girl." Maybe that was meant to console Tray, I didn't know.

"You do get nice stuff" I assured Tray, hoping he didn't want me to list anything.

"I'm going to go and see if they'll let me help" Immanuel said, and he ran off, completely ignoring Sam who called out "They'll just turn the hose on you" to him.

"Why? Why would you use fucking trash bags as clothing?" Eric railed. "When it was perfectly clear, to anyone who isn't a fucking cretin, that they were to be used for trash!" Well, actually they were just lying around, being ignored. But I didn't think pointing that out was going to help at the moment.

"Hey!" Sam said, pointing to the forgotten box on the bed. "That's a bigger box."

"Um…" I started to say, but it was too late. Tray was already peering in the box, probably with a view to turfing its contents and claiming it as his own.

"That's not for you guys!" I warned, as Eric finally stopped looking out the window and bemoaning the loss of his bin liners to Pam's play-time, and saw what was happening. But before he could say anything Tray screwed up his face. "Why is everyone so interested in boobs?" he asked. I looked at Eric hoping he could cover that one, Eric seemed to be back looking for the bin liners which had quite obviously gone next door with Pam.

Sam tried to glance inside the box without anyone noticing, and failed, because quite clearly I'd noticed.

"I mean, that girl looks kind of weird. I think there's something wrong with them" Tray said, pointing at the cover of the magazine on top.

"Mmm" Sam said, his eyes flicking from the magazine and then up to me. And then he tried to find something else to look at.

"So I can have the box, eh?" Tray said, tipping up its contents onto the bed without waiting for any kind of go-ahead from Eric or me. "Tray!" I said, but it was too late as he'd won his prize and wasn't really listening to me now. All the kids tended to do that at times, I guess it was part of being a big family. If you saw something you claimed it before someone else got the same idea. Scarce resources and all of that.

Although Eric wasn't showing any signs of congratulating Tray for gaining the scarce resource he'd found, and he didn't look like he wanted to tell him to leave it alone either. He frowned at Tray, which was a next to useless gesture, and then looked at his watch.

"I'll have to get going" he said, which was typical. Leave me to deal with it all why don't you, I thought.

"Go where?" Tray asked, as he measured whether the skateboard would fit in the new box he'd found. Sam was still trying to get a better look at the magazines, but wasn't brave enough to touch them and now most of them were face-down so he wasn't getting much of a view of them.

"Take the Corvette and see if I can sell it" Eric said, casually, looking around. I picked up his wallet off the chest of drawers and handed it to him, while trying to catch his gaze and flick my eyes over to the pile of magazines in the hope he might say something. Eric completely misread that and instead walked over to the bedside table where he'd left his sunglasses.

"Why are you selling it?" Tray asked.

"I've got to do something with it" Eric said. "We can't keep it."

Tray looked a bit flabbergasted. "But…but…can't we?"

"Does it fit it in that box?" Eric asked, pointing to the box Tray was holding. Tray looked at it sadly, and shook his head. "Then you can't keep it" Eric said.

"Well, that just sucks!" Tray said.

"You get a skateboard" Eric said. "Be happy with that."

Tray sighed loudly and looked forlorn. "You can come too, if you want" Eric said, as he strode out of the room. Tray hustled after him.

So now it was only Sam and I, and a bunch of inappropriate reading material scattered on the bed. I moved over to try to shuffle them all into a pile before putting them in…well; there weren't any more rubbish bags here. I'd have to get a box for them.

"Can you put one of those boxes together, please?" I asked Sam, pointing to the pile of flattened boxes.

Sam started folding the box. "We're not taking those home, are we?" Sam asked.

"No" I said. "No, we're not, but I just need something to put them in, now that Tray's nicked off with the box they were in."

Sam handed me the box and looked at the magazines like they might bite, and then, when my back was turned, he slipped out of the room. I packed the magazines away and realised that someone was probably going to have to say something to Sam, and Tray, about them and why they were here.

And I nominated Eric. It seemed only fair. After all, I'd been left here to empty out the wardrobe by the looks of it.

I started pulling clothes off hangars and shoving them in the one remaining rubbish bag. I hoped Eric brought some more back with him.

EPOV

Sookie finding that box hadn't exactly been part of the plan for clearing out Dad's bedroom, because fuck, I was supposed to get rid of it. But she thought it was Dad's so it wasn't the end of the world. After all, he was dead so it wasn't like he was going to contradict me.

And I hadn't exactly lied, I'd just not corrected Sookie and the assumption she'd made about them.

But the boys looking through it all was a bit fucking wrong. I just hoped they hadn't really been paying much attention, despite Tray's comments about the boobs. Sam hadn't said much. That had to be a good sign.

And in the meantime, the ride in the Corvette was hopefully distracting Tray. Certainly the idea of selling the Corvette was definitely distracting Tray.

"Immanuel's dad said you could put cars on a big boat and take them wherever you want" Tray explained helpfully.

"Mmm" I said. Well, you could. But it seemed like a lot of effort for something that would always remind me of my father. It was nice to drive…but no. No we weren't taking the car home with us. Tray would have to make do with a fucking skateboard.

"But I haven't seen any boats around here…" Tray said, twisting around to look out the window, as though one might appear on the horizon.

"There isn't a harbour" I explained.

"What?" Tray asked.

I sighed. Yeah, he came from a city with two harbours. He wasn't used to the ocean being a place you had to actually fucking drive to get to. "No ocean" I explained.

"Oh" Tray said. "So, could we put the car on a plane?"

"No" I replied. "No, we're selling the car. I've already said that."

Tray sighed, noisily. "But it's a really cool car" he whined.

"I know" I said.

"And no one else has a car like this."

"No. Well if we took it home, the steering wheel would be on the wrong side for a start."

"What?" Tray asked.

"Think about it, Tray."

"Oh. Oh yeah." He was silent for a bit. "What about, if we got a really big box Dad?"

"No."

We pulled up at the car yard and some salesman hustled down to see us before I'd even opened the door. I explained I was here to see the manager with a view to selling a car and he lost interest in me pretty quickly. Probably about the same time I lost sight of Tray. The faint sound of the odd tire being kicked suggested he hadn't gone too far though.

The manager came walking out of the office with his hand extended. "Eric" he said. "Good to see you again."

I hadn't a fucking clue who this guy was, but I assumed he knew Dad. He also seemed to know the Corvette.

"Stan loved that car" he said, standing back and looking at it. It did look quite good now Amelia and Felicia had cleaned it. They'd also cleaned the driveway, the side of the house, some of the garden and quite a bit of each other, too, judging by how far the water had spread. I was just glad we were going to be fucking leaving the neighbourhood before anyone could think to complain about the quite obvious waste. Once again, it was pretty clear my kids weren't from around here.

"I love it too" Tray said, having suddenly reappeared beside me. "But Dad says we're not keeping it."

"Well that's a shame" the guy said, not very sincerely. "But I'm sure we can get you a good price."

Tray looked at him sharply, and then looked at me. I guess it was pretty clear the car was going now.

"So why don't you come inside and we'll discuss it?" the guy said to me, then he looked at Tray. "You want a soda?" he asked.

"What?" Tray asked.

"Drink, Tray" I interpreted. "Soft drink."

"Oh. Yeah. Can I have Coke?"

"Sure" the manager said to Tray, as he turned and walked back to the office.

"Because I'm kind of sad" Tray said. "About the car."

"Yeah" I agreed. "I know."

We filed into the guy's office and Tray was handed a Coke from a small refrigerator in the corner. With a bit of prompting he said thank-you, and then busied himself re-arranging all the model cars on the guy's desk.

"So" he said, as he took his seat opposite me. "Guess I'd better give you a price, huh?"

"Yep" I agreed, and he made me an offer which was far, far too fucking low. So I suggested something a little higher and he pulled a face. "Well, there's not _that_ much of a market for them, you know?"

I shrugged. And waited. The guy, who according to the nameplate on his desk was called Mark Simpson, blew out a breath. Even knowing his name didn't make me remember the guy, but he did know Dad.

"Dad really did love that car" I said.

"Is that the dead guy Pam named her cat after?" Tray asked. I nodded. "Stan's a weird cat" he announced, and then he went back to trying to dismantle the model Jaguar on the guy's desk while the guy watched nervously.

"It's a very special car" I said. "I'll be sad to get rid of it, but I just can't justify shipping it to New Zealand" I said, as wistfully as I could.

"There aren't any boats. Or really big boxes" Tray added, taking a big slurp of his soda.

Mark Simpson continued to look thoughtful. "Well" he said. "I guess I could up it a small amount. He was a good friend, after all." OK, so Dad had been buying the drinks then. Mark Simpson named a price. "That's about as good as I can go" he said, "But it's a fair price. More than fair."

Tray looked at him suddenly. I expected him to ask if the car was really worth that much, thinking it would sound like a lot of money to a seven year old. Instead he said. "Nah, it's worth more than that."

"Oh no" Mark Simpson said. "No, I think you'll find that…" But he didn't get to finish as Tray started talking over him.

"There's that other one" Tray said. "Over there, with the other cars. But it's yellow. So that's a stink colour. And the sign in the window says it's worth more. Also that white one. That's newer, but there's something really wrong with the seats, eh? 'Cos they're all cracked and stuff. So I wouldn't want _that _one. I like our one. But we can't keep it." He looked expectantly at Mark Simpson, who'd gone very silent.

Who knew the lesson of the afternoon would be never fucking underestimate Tray?

It was a much better lesson than girls, hoses and bikinis are a bad combination when they're your girls, or that Sookie will find whatever I try to hide under the fucking bed. No, this lesson might actually make me some money.

"OK" Mark Simpson said, collecting himself. "Well, just because of Stan, I guess. I could give you another five. But no more."

"Done" I said, before Tray broke something and we ended up getting charged for that. He was getting far too close to removing something off one of the model cars. I took the one he was holding out of his hand. "Finish your Coke" I said to him, and he threw it back. And then he burped, noisily.

"That's fizzy" he commented.

"Yep" I said, as Mark Simpson pulled a contract out of his drawer for me to sign.

"He's a chip off the old block, isn't he?" Mark Simpson asked, nodding at Tray.

"What?" I asked. Fuck. I hoped he didn't turn out to be too much like Dad. Maybe I should be limiting the Coke? Was addiction to caffeine and whatever the fuck other chemicals they put in there just the top of a slippery slope that would lead to a life spent drowning his sorrows?

"Just like you at that age" Mark Simpson said, and then before I could reply, he passed over the contract for me to sign. And that was the end of the Corvette.

When I'd said goodbye to Mark Simpson, and Tray had said a long goodbye to the Corvette, we found ourselves standing outside on the sidewalk. "How're we going to get home?" Tray asked, squinting down the street.

"Cab. I guess." I replied. I hadn't really thought that part through. I could call Sookie, but chances were that she was busy with clearing out Dad's room. And it wouldn't be fair to disturb her when she was working so hard.

"Oh" Tray said. "D'you think we can do something first?"

"Like what?"

Tray shrugged. "Like, spend some of that money? You know, the extra money that he gave us?"

"What do you want Tray?"

"Well…" he said, looking at the pavement. "Where do you get those little cars from? 'Cos maybe Mum'd let me keep a Corvette if I could fit it in my box?"

"With the skateboard?"

"Yeah, with the skateboard. Sam's taking the water guns, but I don't think they're gonna fit."

"Probably not" I agreed, as we started walking down the street towards the main part of town. I was sure there was a store that had models around here somewhere. And maybe I'd get Sookie some flowers, just because. And I needed to get more trash bags, to replace the ones Pam had taken to her new home next door.

So I was mostly concentrating on mapping out where I needed to go and trying to remember where the stores were around here. They'd probably all changed I thought. It had been a long time. There was a lot around here I didn't fucking recognise, and what I did, looked different. And then I saw it. The sign over the door was in pink, of course, and the script was really curly and actually pretty fucking hard to read.

So that was marketing fuck-up number one.

Number two was giving the place a name which really did sound like a fucking pet salon.

**Thanks for reading!**


	40. Chapter 40

**A/N So this is a little short, but I kind of liked where it finished, so I'll put it up now. And for those of you keeping score at home, I now have three smiley faces, and one frowny face for the beef teriyaki stir-fry that my little judge doesn't like. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

"Why did we stop here?" Tray asked me. "Is this the shop with the little cars? 'Cos we're doing that next, eh?"

"No" I replied, still just staring at the outside of it. It really was a fucking monstrosity.

Tray sighed. "It's so pink. They'd be pink cars, in there, wouldn't they Dad? And pink's a stupid colour for a car, like that car Pam puts her dolls in."

"It's a Corvette" I said.

"What is? We just gave the Corvette to that guy. The one with the cars."

"No. The car the Barbies have. It's a Corvette. A pink one."

"Really?" Tray asked, incredulously. "Well, that's wrong. I thought the yellow one looked fucked-up, but pink's way worse." He paused for a moment. "So…does that mean Pam has a Corvette? And I don't?"

"She inherited it. And we're getting you one." We were. We'd start walking again in a minute. Once I'd finished marvelling at the monument to bad-taste this fucking…well, day spa it was, according to the sign. I looked around. Fucking weird place for a _day spa_. It wasn't exactly the best fucking neighbourhood…although maybe it wasn't quite as shitty as I remembered it being. And there was a sizeable parking lot around the back. I wondered how many clients you could fit in that parking lot.

"I'm hungry" Tray announced.

"Uh-huh" I said. You couldn't see much of what was going on inside, all the windows were hidden by some fucking ugly white curtains. I guess the clientele didn't want to be watched while they were...well, whatever the fuck you did in a day spa.

"Is there food?" Tray asked.

"No, Tray. There's no food."

"Mum always has food" he grumbled. I didn't say anything to that. He was right. We both knew he was right. Saying it out loud wasn't going to bring us any food, or make Sookie magically appear in front of us with food.

Tray went quiet. I wondered just how busy it was in there; could you really make money out of a salon? Or even a fucking chain of salons? And did calling them day spas make a difference?

A woman who must have been a client walked around the side of the building from the parking lot and gave Tray and I a funny look. Probably because Tray was staring at her handbag longingly. After all, that was where his mother kept the stash of food she always travelled with.

And then she held the door open. And Tray followed her inside. Possibly he thought she was going to feed him…or something. I had no fucking clue what he thought he was doing. But now Tray was in the salon and I had no fucking choice.

I'd have to go in.

Or would I?

Maybe if I waited out here long enough Tray would get bored and come out.

But…how many fucking women and their fucking handbags were in there? And how many of those handbags contained snacks? And how many of those women could Tray con into handing over their snacks? He could look pretty hopeless and cute when it suited him. As long as he wasn't knocking stuff over, swearing, farting or burping they might decide to make him their honorary mascot and stuff him full of crackers, cookies and whatever the fuck else they were all carrying.

It dawned on me that Tray could be in there for a very long time. And there was only so long that I wanted to loiter outside a fucking salon. Or day spa. Or whatever the fuck it was. As it was a woman walked out just then, shaking her hands and staring at me like I was some kind of fucking pervert. Because, clearly, it was a super-fucking-awesome plan to stand out here on the street in the middle of the fucking day and look for a woman to kidnap. I wasn't sure whether I was more insulted about being mistaken for some kind of fucking pervert, or a fucking pervert who was so retarded he'd get caught long before he had the chance to do anything really perverted.

That didn't solve the Tray problem. He wasn't coming out. I wondered if maybe he was getting a manicure. When he'd been small he'd let Sookie and his sisters paint his nails all the time, but not so much recently. Although he had liked it when Amelia had that black nail polish. So who could really tell. If there was enough free food he might be up for anything. It wasn't particularly difficult to buy Tray's love and compliance.

On the other hand, there was always the chance he could knock something over. Or break something. That was one of Tray's specialities. He'd been pretty close to fucking up one of the cars the manager of the car yard had had on his desk, and it wouldn't take much for him to destroy something in a beauty salon. I could imagine that there'd be all kinds of breakable shit in there. And then…what? Would they expect me to fucking pay for it? Would she write it off because it was her grandson?

Was she even fucking in there?

Maybe she wasn't and maybe I could just go in there, grab Tray and leave, because Tray still wasn't fucking coming out. Two minutes earlier all he could think about was getting a model car and getting fed, and now, well now he'd just fucked off out of sight and I was pretty sure he hadn't found any models. So they had to be feeding him. Had to be.

What kind of person feeds someone else's kid without asking the parent?

Fuck. Maybe they thought he was homeless. What the fuck had Tray been wearing? And, more importantly, had he been wearing shoes? I tried to remember, but I couldn't. Fuck. Fucking Tray. Fucking Tray and his inability to dress himself, not fucking wander off or resist the temptation of a free fucking meal.

I pushed the door open and one of those annoying little bells rang. Inside everything was white. And pink. Lots and lots of pink. It kind of explained a lot about the fucking décor I'd grown up with. Tray had his hand in a large glass bowl on the reception desk helping himself to what looked like handfuls of fucking mint candies.

"Tray!" I hissed. "They're not just for you."

"She said I could" Tray said, with his mouth full. Fuck. I had no idea who the 'she' might be, because there was no one around. I just wanted to get out of here. I hated it.

"It smells funny in here" Tray commented, and he unwrapped another candy.

"Yeah" I agreed. "I think it's fucking poisonous, let's go."

Just then a girl in a white smock like the ones dental hygienists wore walked out from the door to the back. "So, here you go, sweetie" she said to Tray. "There's our price list. What do think Mommy would like?"

Tray looked at her like she was slightly slow. "Well, those" he said, pointing to the enormous bunch of flowers that was sitting on the counter. It was almost as big as Tray was.

"Oh" the girl said. "Oh…I…"

"They don't sell flowers here, Tray" I said to him.

He turned around to look at me. "They don't?" he asked.

"Nope. Those are just for decoration."

"Really? Well, that sucks" Tray said. "I thought that's why we were coming in here. 'Cos you said we should get Mum some flowers."

Tray always picked the most surprising times to fucking listen to what I was saying, that much was clear. "Well, no. We weren't coming in here. You came in here. By mistake." I smiled at the girl behind the desk, and she smiled back. Yep, I was here because my son was an idiot, we'd just go with that explanation.

And then we'd leave. "Come on Tray. Let's go" I said, putting my hand on his back to turn him around.

"But we have to get Mum a present" he said. "And she likes pink stuff."

"Pam likes pink stuff" I pointed out. That was a fucking mistake.

"You know Pamela?" the girl behind reception asked me. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

"Different Pam" I said, still trying to get Tray to move. Tray wasn't really going along with that plan. I wished I'd fucking brought some food with me so I could bribe him out of here. I wondered if they'd mind me taking some of those candies to lead a trail out the door.

"Pam knows that other Pam" Tray said, like there were only two Pamela's in the entire world. "The one that came over and sat in the yucky chair and wanted to paint Pam's nails or something…hey, that's what that smell is! It's not poison. It's like nail polish. It stinks." He wrinkled his nose up.

The girl behind the reception desk looked a bit confused. "So…did you want to speak to Pamela?" she asked.

"Nope" I said. "Nope. Not at all. We'll just get going now. Thank-you for your time."

I finally persuaded Tray to start walking by practically shoving him in the direction of the door. "Bye!" he called out cheerfully, clutching the last couple of candies he had in his hand. And then we were outside, back on the street, in the sunshine, on our way to buy a model Corvette. Everything was OK again.

"Look, Dad! There's that Pam lady! But her car isn't pink. It's silver. Hey, is that a Porsche, Dad? That's like a girl's car, eh?"

Fuck. We'd been so close. She'd pulled right into a spot at the front which was clearly reserved for her and was sitting in the car, talking on a cell.

"Yeah" I said to Tray. "But weren't we going to get you a Corvette? One that isn't pink?"

"Yep" Tray agreed, and we started to walk off. We almost got away.

"Eric!" she called out. "Eric, is that you?" I tried to keep walking, but Tray stopped. "Hey, Dad" he said. "Hey, she's calling you. That's your name."

I looked at him. I could try denying it, but it probably wasn't going to wash. At this point he'd known me for too long. I wondered whether it might have been a good plan if I'd changed my first name as well as my last.

I turned around and she was standing beside the car. From this distance I couldn't tell if she really looked any different to when she'd left. It was…fuck. It was horrible, seeing her standing there. Real. In the flesh. Like some kind of nightmare had suddenly come to life or something.

Although there was a part of me that remembered when I'd wished for this moment so fervently it had almost hurt. And then a tiny part of me felt…fucking hopeful. After everything that had happened, after everything she'd fucking done, there was still that part of me that wanted to think she was here for me.

But she wasn't. She was here because this was her business and that was her parking space and at the end of the day I'd brought her the wrong fucking grandkid anyway. It wasn't like she was going to be exactly jumping for joy about the fact Tray had been in there, eating all her candy. So fuck her.

I stayed where I was and she walked over. Slowly, though. Like she wasn't sure about the whole thing. I fucking wasn't sure either, but the only reason I was staying rooted to the spot was that I had Tray with me and he might not keep up if I suddenly made a run for it.

At least, that's what I told myself.

So while managing to feel both sick to the fucking core, and intensely curious at the same time, I watched her approach. And then she just stood there, and looked us both up and down. I did the same. Yeah, she was older. But she looked good. For a woman of her age.

But then she always had. All those memories that the fucking photos in the box hadn't triggered came fucking flooding back now. Watching her put her make-up on, all the times I got told not to get her dirty, not to knock anything over, not to touch. My whole life had been a fucking lesson in not touching anything.

So that was one thing. She wouldn't exactly be expecting me to hug her.

"You're here" she said.

"Just passing" I confirmed. There was a moment of silence and then Tray broke into the conversation. "We just gave the Corvette to this guy? Well, he gave us some money. Now we're going to buy a Corvette that fits in a box, but that isn't pink. Pink sucks. Shit." He dropped the candy he'd just unwrapped on the sidewalk and then bent down to pick it up before putting it in his mouth.

Pamela looked at him. I'm pretty sure she winced. "OK" she said, and then her gaze shifted to me. "Stan's Corvette?" she asked.

"Yep" I confirmed. "Not going to do him any good where he is."

"No" she agreed. "He must be turning over in his grave. Knowing that you just gave it away like that. He loved that car."

"He's not buried. He was cremated. It was what he wanted" I said to her.

"Mmm" she said. I briefly wondered what her preference would be. And who she thought was going to act on her wishes when the time came. Did she have someone in her life?

But I didn't ask. I didn't really want to know, I decided.

'You know" she said. "When you were walking away, before. When I could just see your back…I thought you were him for a moment."

"Who? Dad?" I asked. Fuck, she had to start up that fucking line of accusation again. I was just like him, I was never going to be any different and if I didn't watch my step I'd be spending my old age sitting in a chair and drinking myself to fucking death. Always the same story, I was just like Dad and there was no escaping it no matter what I did or said or tried to be.

It occurred to me that it was possibly the only thing that my parents had ever agreed on.

She shook her head. "No. My grandfather. It was…well, not what I expected." She looked at me, her eyes searching my face for a moment, and then she stopped and drew herself up, her gaze flicking away. "Of course, I haven't seen you since you were that size." She pointed a finger at Tray, who looked worried, like he'd been caught out doing something wrong.

Well, probably he had in my mother's eyes. Fuck knows I'd never exactly pleased her with my presence.

"I suppose you are using his name" she mused. Tray looked at me. "Is there another Eric like there's another Pam?" he asked.

"Nope" I said, and he continued to look confused. "There's, like, tons of other Sam's, but no other Tray's at school."

He didn't get any acknowledgement from either Pamela or I for that, so he gave up and started to look around for something to do. I knew I had exactly twenty seconds before he got completely bored and walked off.

And that was probably twenty seconds more than I wanted to waste standing around with my mother. "We're going to go now" I said to Tray. And her. She didn't say anything, just nodded.

"OK" Tray said. "Bye, uh…Pamela, or Pam, or…um…" he trailed off.

"Goodbye" she said, and then I assumed she turned around too and walked in the opposite direction back to the salon. Maybe she didn't. Maybe she watched us walk down to the corner and disappear around it.

I'll never know.

But if she wanted a second chance, well, then that had fucking been it. And she hadn't exactly made the best of it. And I realised that it didn't matter if it had happened twenty years, or thirty years earlier, if it had happened when I'd looked like Tray and not like my great-grandfather. It still would have been the same. I'd have been walking around a corner and she would have been letting me go.

And that thought was always going to fucking hurt like hell.

"OK" I said to Tray. "I think that store's the one we want. I'm pretty sure it has models you can build. There's bound to be a Corvette. They're a classic, after all."

"Sweet" Tray said. "And then, can we get ice cream? If I don't tell anyone else?"

"Sure, Tray. We can get ice cream."

"Awesome."

**Thanks for reading!**


	41. Chapter 41

**A/N So my husband had a bit of a trying weekend. He made dinner on Sunday night. He did not get a smiley face. Yeah. He'd also had to put up with the toddler, who likes to narrate everything we do, watching him dress. I think the statement that "Your penis is in your knickers" might have been what put him over the edge that day. When she hangs out with me all I get is "When I big I get a bwra?", which is her new mantra and she likes to check that fact with perfect strangers. But I did lose some sympathy with my hubby at the point where he stated he was going on Twitter to announce that the underpants fairy appeared to have broken up with him as she hasn't visited recently and he's been forced to resort to wearing the yucky underpants from the back of the drawer. So expect announcements from the toddler on that fact any day now.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but the toddler's version of this story would be entertaining, if a little bit repetitive.**

SPOV

It was hot in that bedroom with the afternoon sun pouring in. Luckily I could only pull so many clothes out of the wardrobe before the bag was full. I considered going and finding Immanuel and seeing if I could take his costume off him and re-patch it, but it didn't seem worth it.

Plus, I had to move on to making dinner. Blah, blah, blah. Some days I was just over the whole 'what to feed everyone' question. And I was hot and tired and wanted, mostly, to have a little whinge to someone about that fact.

But no one around here would have cared. And it didn't get me out of making dinner.

I contemplated salad, as the whole idea of turning the oven on was less than appealing right then, but there was no way it would work. Not even with the majority of the anti-salad contingent out of the house doing God knows what.

Unsurprisingly, when I reached the kitchen it was pretty clear no one had nicked off with the oven to use it as packing materials or play equipment. That would have given me a perfectly good excuse not to cook, after all. I sighed. There was nothing for it but to press on with the original plan for dinner.

I was kind of bored by it all though, sometimes that happened. If I was at home I'd pull out my cookbooks or have a look online and try out something new. Here I didn't have the same resources, and I couldn't be bothered getting out Eric's laptop. I looked around and had an idea. Maybe I could make something for dessert, just for the hell of it. If nothing else, it would entertain me for a while.

I'd just finished putting chicken thighs in the oven to bake when Tray arrived in the kitchen looking suspiciously sticky and clutching a box. "We came home in a cab!" Tray said. "It was great!"

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah. 'Cos that guy with the other cars got the Corvette. That was kind of stink. I got this one though." He held up his box. "I have to build it. Um, just me. Not Dad." He gave me a significant look, like he expected me to be the one to break the news to Eric. "So I'm going to do that now…" he started moving the placemats to the side of the table.

"Um…no" I said. "It's nearly dinner time."

"Really?" Tray asked, which immediately made me really suspicious about what Tray and Eric had been doing. It wasn't like Tray to not be looking for food.

"It'll have to be later Tray" Eric said, as he walked into the kitchen too. He looked less sticky, but I still suspected him of indulging when he was out. "Fuck, the price of a fucking cab ride is ridiculous now."

"Uh-huh" I agreed. It was all pretty expensive over here. I kept on chopping up broccoli.

"We got you these" Eric said, handing me a large bouquet of flowers. "To say thank-you for all your hard work."

"Oh, lovely. Thank-you" I said, kissing Eric on the cheek as he put down the other bags he was carrying. The flowers looked vaguely pornographic. And very spiky. I wondered if he'd let Tray pick them and they'd gone for whatever looked like it belonged on the set of _Star Wars_.

"I'll, um…" Crap. What would I do with them? "I'll just put them on the bench and find a vase after I've finished the veges" I said in the end, hoping there was one around here somewhere. If not, I'd have to put them in a bucket, I'd found one of those.

"Dad, Mum says I can't use the table because it's nearly dinner-time" Tray complained. Eric just looked at him, without much sympathy at all. In the end Tray sighed and went outside. From what I'd been hearing Felicia, Immanuel and Sam had been playing soccer out there. There seemed to be a lot of shouting from Felicia when she thought she was 'coaching' the boys and a lot of shouting from Sam when he didn't take too kindly to being coached. Immanuel had been pretty quiet, I thought, so he may have been driven home or he was just so happy to have other kids to play with that he didn't want to rock the boat.

Two seconds later, Sam burst into the kitchen. "How come Tray got a Corvette?" he asked. Yeah, news like that travelled fast.

"I got this for you" Eric said, he pulled a box out of the shopping bag he was carrying and handed it to Sam.

"Cool. Thanks" Sam said, showing the box to me.

"A…tank?" I asked.

"Yeah" Sam said. "There was thing on the army we saw on TV. Hey, 'cos you're from here, I could join the army here, couldn't I?" he asked Eric.

"No!" I said quickly. "No it has to be in the country of your birth."

"The New Zealand army?" Sam said, and he pulled a face. Behind him Eric pulled almost the exact same face.

"You'd get to go on peace-keeping missions, and, um…well, there's all the humanitarian stuff. Like in disasters. Oh, and there's the search and rescue missions!" I said. Probably they wouldn't use me for their recruiting ads.

"Yeah…OK" Sam said, giving me a thoroughly dubious look, and then he ran off with his prize to show everyone else.

Eric sighed. "I don't know why you bother even having a military" he said, pulling out something else and putting it in the freezer. "Ice cream. For after dinner" he said.

"Did you get bin liners?" I asked, and he nodded. "We need a defence force because…" I continued, putting the broccoli to one side and starting on the capsicum that needed to be sliced up, "We can't trust you guys to stick to your own side of the Pacific."

Eric laughed. "Really?" he asked. "You think we'd invade New Zealand?"

"Well, not so much invade…as just kind of…" I tried to be diplomatic. "Take over. Everything. Like you own it. Anyway, the point was to put Sam somewhere he's less likely to have people shooting at him."

"Because in the New Zealand army, it's all about fucking knitting sweaters for people in need, isn't it Sookie? Maybe occasionally poking them with a knitting needle?"

"Yeah, right" I scoffed. Felicia burst in the back door with what was probably quite good timing, there was always the chance it could get nasty. If Eric kept making cracks about knitting needles I might be tempted to go and find one of Pam's and see exactly how much he liked being poked with it.

"What did I get?" Felicia demanded.

"Um…" Eric looked thoughtful. "There's ice cream for after dinner."

"But that's for everyone" Felicia said, scathingly. "Sam and Tray got actual presents."

"Well…I didn't know what you wanted" Eric said. "So maybe you can get something, another time."

"Tomorrow?" Felicia asked.

"Well, OK" Eric agreed.

"OK. We'll go out tomorrow. And I can show you what I want."

"Within reason" Eric added.

"Define reason" Felicia countered. This could go on for a long time. I started on the carrots.

"I'll define reason when you show me what it is you want" Eric said.

"But I won't know if it's worth telling you I want it, if I don't know if it's what you think is within reason" Felicia said, putting her hands on her hips. She kind of reminded me of someone but I wasn't sure who. Not Lorena…maybe Aunty Linda?

"Felicia, just take the offer and be happy with it" Eric tried.

"But you won't tell me what's within reason!" she cried.

"Within reason is accepting we'll figure it all out tomorrow, not now" Eric said.

Felicia huffed, but didn't say anything else. She gave Eric a long, hard stare which might as well have bounced off him. She was probably wishing for a knitting needle about now. In the end she said "Fine" and went back outside.

"It's like dealing with you" Eric muttered, and then he nicked some of the carrot I'd just chopped up and walked off. I don't know where he got that idea from.

"I'm bored!" Amelia said, as she came in and sat down at the table.

"Really?" I asked, wondering what that was like. Well, what it was like to be bored but not busy, anyway. "Have you run out of books?" I asked her. Amelia waved a hand dismissively at me and stared out the window. I went back to getting my veges steamed and the potatoes cooked.

Amelia sat there, looking around. "There's a lot of crap on the floor" she muttered.

"Everyone drags it in when they run back inside" I said, as Sam proved my point by running through the kitchen.

Amelia sighed, and then looked around some more, and then settled on the broom, hesitated, and then walked over to pick it up and start sweeping. She'd spent a few minutes making a nice pile of leaves and dirt while I had some happy thoughts that maybe one of the kids maybe slightly took after me, when Tray tried to run inside. "No!" Amelia said, brandishing the broom.

"But…no, what?" Tray said.

"No. The floor's clean now. You have to stay outside."

"I don't want to stay outside" Tray said.

"Well you shouldn't have gotten mucky feet then, now go!" Amelia said, waving the broom at him again. Tray hesitated, and his eyes flicked to me, so I busied myself checking the chicken in the oven.

Maybe Eric's style of parenting was rubbing off on me, but I was curious to see where this went.

In the end, Tray huffed and marched off. Probably just to go in the front door, which I'm pretty sure was unlocked, but Amelia was counting it as a victory. "I can't believe they just waltz in and get the place so grubby" she muttered. Well, I could. Everyone had been doing that to me when I cleaned up for years.

"Mmm-hmm" I said sympathetically. It was nice, sharing this whole mother-daughter thing. I had a brief moment of happiness when I imagined us in ten or fifteen years' time, sharing cups of tea and bonding over the domestic chores. "Of course you've just stopped cleaning up, mostly" Amelia said, looking around. "So…well, you know." She shrugged and went to find the brush and pan in the nook that contained the laundry.

I adjusted my daydream. It would be more like having tea with a younger version of Lorena, then. Maybe I wouldn't sit around and look forward to that day quite so much.

Amelia scooped the pile she'd made into the pan and emptied it into the bin. She sighed. "It's still really grubby, by the door" she announced. "I'll just try cleaning that bit." She got out the cleaning spray and took some paper towels and started scrubbing the entrance by the backdoor. She was still down on her hands and knees working on a stain on the lino which I think might have actually been a cigarette burn when Eric walked in the backdoor. "No" she said, automatically.

"No, what?" Eric asked.

"No, you can't come in. This entrance is closed. I've cleaned and you're just making it all dirty again."

Eric looked at her blankly. I was trying to make eye contact with him and signal something along the lines of 'I know she's being a pain in the bum, but look! She cleaned! Without being asked! Let's just play along and hope it happens again.' Yeah, I had absolutely no hope of getting that one across.

But it was worth a shot.

Eric stopped looking at Amelia, and looked at me instead. He looked a bit puzzled, and then like realisation had hit. "Yeah, we'll go out tomorrow" he said to Amelia.

"What?" she asked, still frowning at Eric's feet. I had a feeling if he stood there for much longer she'd start poking at his foot with the bottle of cleaner in the hope it might make him leave.

"Tomorrow. I said to Felicia I'd get her something then. Same applies to you. Within reason, though."

Amelia looked up from Eric's feet to his face. "I'm…getting _something_?" she asked.

"Yeah. You know. Present. The boys got models. We'll go shopping tomorrow."

"Oh" Amelia said. "Oh!"

"Yeah, as well as finish off some of that clearing out" I added. I hoped that eventually I'd get some help with that.

"Mmm" Eric said, as he left the kitchen.

"Well" Amelia said, standing up and admiring her handiwork. "I did do a good job with the floor. There's a heap less crap on it now, so it's _much_ better." And then she put the cleaner and the paper towels back and left too, after one last satisfied look at her handiwork. Oh well, maybe she would do it again. Although I didn't exactly know how I was going to keep on being able to afford her services.

Dinner ended up being slightly delayed while Amelia was dispatched to persuade Pam to come home. I'd originally asked Eric to do it, but somehow he'd delegated that one and Amelia, secure in the knowledge that Dad was chucking money about, went next door.

The rest of us were sitting at the table when Pam and Amelia finally arrived home. Eric glanced briefly in her direction, and didn't say anything. "Finally!" Sam said, having been told he couldn't start eating until everyone was here.

"Did you have fun?" I asked Pam.

"Yeah" she said, shrugging, and pointedly looking anywhere but at Eric. I really wanted to bang their heads together, but it wouldn't do any good.

"And after we gave the Corvette away…" Tray said.

"Sold the Corvette, Tray" Eric corrected.

"Yeah. So the guy kept it, and we had to walk, which was kind of stink. Except that Dad said we could get the model Corvette. And we got ice…um. We saw that pink place, eh Dad? And the other lady."

"What other lady?" Felicia asked.

"You know, the one that came here and talked to Pam. And had Pam's name and stuff. She lives in a pink house." Tray continued on trying to hide his broccoli under the bone leftover from his chicken. I looked over at Eric. He looked uncomfortable. "Just eat the fucking broccoli!" he said to Tray, who hunkered down and put a piece in his mouth.

Pam looked very interested in it all, and almost looked at Eric, but I could see her pull her eyes away at the last minute. In the end she settled on Tray. "So…her house is pink?" she asked him.

"Yeah…lots of pink" Tray said, eating a piece of potato and glaring at Sam who had finished all of his potatoes and was, I think, waiting for Tray to get distracted so he could steal some of his. "Oh, and there were these chocolates you could just eat. If you wanted them."

Eric looked kind of pained. "It was, uh, a beauty salon, Tray. It wasn't her house."

"Oh. Really. So where does she live?" Tray asked. Eric shrugged. Tray went back to eating potatoes and ignoring the broccoli.

"Did she ask you why I wasn't there?" Pam asked Tray.

"Nope" Tray said. "She just told Dad he looked some other guy…are there more potatoes?"

"No. There's more veges though" I informed Tray, and he looked a bit crestfallen. Pam looked disappointed, and went back to eating her own dinner. Eric looked pained at the whole thing, but pressed on with his dinner too. Sam and Felicia were kind of oblivious, engaged, as they were, in a battle over where Sam was allowed to put his elbow. Nowhere near Felicia it seemed.

Tray dropped some broccoli on the floor, accidentally on purpose. At home, Ivan would have attended to that for us, but here, it just languished. "Tray!" Amelia yelled. "I cleaned that floor!"

Tray looked at her and seemed completely unconcerned. "Pick it up" Amelia said.

"I don't have to eat floor-broccoli!" Tray yelled, sounding kind of panicked.

"No, but you have to pick it up. Just put it in the bin" I said. And then I turned a blind eye to the fact he swept a few more pieces of broccoli into his hand before he climbed off the high stool he was sitting on and got down to pick up the broccoli before walking over to the bin. During this we all turned a blind eye to the fact that Tray lost two potatoes, one to Sam and one to Felicia. It kind of seemed like justice.

God, I really was turning into Eric.

Eric was mostly quiet until the dishes were cleared away. "There's ice cream" he reminded me. "For dessert." He went to the freezer and pulled out some containers.

"How many litres did you buy?" I asked.

Eric frowned. "I bought pints" he said. "Because here, I don't have to pretend I know what a litre is."

"It's about a morning's worth of milk" I said to him. "But anyway, look! I have something to go with the ice cream." I presented my surprise.

Eric looked at it with his head cocked to one side. "Did you make apple pie?" he asked.

"Yep" I confirmed. "Well the apples we bought were crap for eating and I wanted to use them up." It was hard work at the moment because we weren't going to be staying here for too long. If we bought something I wanted to make sure it got used up. The exchange rate wasn't exactly in our favour and I didn't want to be throwing a whole lot of stuff out when we left.

"But you make apple crumble, Sookie" Eric informed me. "Not apple pie."

"I'm sure I have before" I said. And I was.

"No. No, I don't think you have" Eric said. Did he really pay that much attention to what he got fed?

"Oh well. When in Rome and all of that." I waved a hand in the air as I carried the pie over to the table.

"We're not in Rome" Amelia said. "We're somewhere far more boring than that."

"Plus, there's no Romans" Sam said, like one might leap out at you from a dark corner. I was pretty sure that didn't happen anywhere.

"Well, no. But there's dessert, eat up" I told them, as Eric carefully watched how much everyone else was taking. OK, maybe he did pay attention to these things.

I wasn't sure what to do though to get him to pay more attention to Pam. I really wanted to broach the subject with him, but I wasn't sure how to do it. Or whether it would do any good at all.

In the meantime I had a pile of washing to tackle, including the towels everyone had used at the pools, and only a tiny washing machine to get them washed in. I was busy jamming stuff in and sizing up whether one more towel would be OK, or just cause the machine to burst apart, when Eric came back into the kitchen and started fiddling with the coffeemaker.

"So, you saw your mum?" I asked him, closing the lid of the machine. That'd have to do. I debated the program to use, wishing that I was at home with the washing machine I was used to, and then switched it on. It rattled to life noisily as I walked into the kitchen.

Eric still hadn't answered me.

"Ran into her" he said, eventually. "It wasn't a plan."

"Oh" I said, sitting at the table. The kids were fighting over the limited space in the living room. It was probably nicer in here at the moment.

"Mmm" Eric added, which didn't actually add much to the conversation.

"I guess it's one of those things, isn't it?" I mused. "The people you least expect to run into are the ones you do. That's always been a mystery to me. How does Lorena manage to turn up every single time I set foot in Mt Albert?" I waited for Eric to say something, but he didn't for a while.

"What I don't understand" he said in the end, after he'd pulled out some coffee mugs and inspected them. "Is why they make the little pieces of Lego so small, when it's pretty clear it'll be the parents building it. Well, me, anyway. Fuck, some of those pieces are fucking tiny. It's impossible to hold onto them properly."

OK. Maybe the conversation hadn't gone _quite_ the way I'd expected. "Mmm" I agreed. "But you cope".

"Well, I don't have a choice" Eric grumbled, as he poured the coffee out. "But it's still a fucking ridiculous design."

"Although you don't get to touch Tray's creations anymore, of course" I said to him, as he handed me a cup and sat down next to me. Tray had taken over the small table in the boys' bedroom, which used to house the train-set, and it was now covered in everything he'd built, mostly out of _Star Wars_ Lego. And no one was allowed to touch any of it; that was Tray's rule. Sam had broken that rule a few times leading to several other rules being broken in quick succession, mainly the ones about using indoor voices and gentle touching.

"Still" I continued. "Pam still lets you build her Lego for her." Maybe that would get the conversation on to Pam, at least.

"I don't understand the appeal of that stuff" Eric said, kind of scathingly. "I mean, all that Lego she got for her birthday? And I ended up building fucking tree-houses and shit like that while Pam sat there and changed the hair-bow the little plastic dog that came with it was wearing. I mean, where the fuck is the fun in that game?"

I didn't know. I suspected it helped if you were a five year old girl. "Maybe when you take Pam out to buy her present, she'll pick something better. That you could do together?" And make up, I silently added.

Eric shrugged, and looked like he maybe didn't want to buy Pam a present. "She's bound to have got wind of the fact you're handing out stuff by now" I said. "News like that travels fast."

Eric still didn't say anything to that. He just drank his coffee. After a while he muttered "I hope no one wants anything too fucking expensive."

"Well you did say within reason." He just hadn't really defined that, so God knows what Amelia would think she was getting. It was bound to be expensive.

"It's probably a good thing there's only five kids" Eric said. "And that's that." He drained the last of his coffee. Yeah, he'd had to move the appointment for his vasectomy when he'd suddenly got the call to come over here. So when he got back home he was booked in to have it done on a Friday morning. And then that was really going to be it.

"They are expensive" I said. "And the exchange rate is kind of crippling. When they all wanted burgers at the pools today, it was hopeless. There went all my cash."

"You do realise, it was just one pool, don't you Sookie?" Eric asked me, but I ignored him.

"Although of course your plan to limit the kids to five kind of puts a dent in my plan to make some money if we ever can't pay the mortgage because we spent it all on junk food and Lego" I added.

Eric looked at me. "You still think you can sell my sperm on the internet, Sookie?" he asked me.

"I just think we should be looking at all our available resources, Eric. You know, figuring out what we can make some money from." This was the point where Eric sometimes suggested we get rid of Pam to a nice family in Asia first, but he didn't tonight. He just stood up and took his cup over to the sink.

So I still didn't know how I was going to fix that problem. And maybe it wasn't my problem to fix, anyway. I just hoped they worked it all out themselves. Hopefully before Pam left home.

But I soon realised I had bigger problems anyway. Or maybe Eric did. I walked into the room Eric and I shared, which was still the home to most of Stan's crap, and I discovered Sam who was hovering around the bed looking at...oh, crap. He was looking in the box with the magazines which I had stupidly left there.

He jumped back though, when I entered. "Um…I was looking for you" he said.

"Uh-huh" I prompted.

"Um…" Sam looked thoughtful. For quite a while. Finally he said. "So…when the girls go out tomorrow, that's just the girls?"

"Um, don't know" I said. I hadn't really made any plans. Well, I was hoping we'd clean this place out, but that seemed to be on the backburner, forever. At the rate we were going I was stuck here forever, fretting about the exchange rate and with a horrible, small washing machine. The thought wasn't a pleasing one.

Maybe if I used the broom on Eric, like Amelia had on Tray, I could get him to come in here and stay in here until the job was done?

"OK, um. OK" Sam said, as he edged around the bed and scampered out the door. Eric walked in just afterwards. "What did Sam want?" he asked.

"Well, he seemed to be drawn in here by the stash of porn we unearthed" I said, pointing to the box.

"Ah" Eric said. "Um, well he didn't take anything, did he?"

"Well, no. But it's still a weird thought that he's interested in it. I guess?" I didn't know. I looked at Eric, hoping for his thoughts. I wasn't the expert on boys and porn, after all. I might have had Jason around at home, but it wasn't exactly anything I discussed with him.

And I was pretty sure my dad wasn't keeping stacks of magazines under the bed. I knew that, because it was my favourite spot for hiding from Jason during hide and seek, although Tina was never thrilled at sharing it with me.

Eric shrugged, which told me nothing. I decided to try to take control of the situation before we ended up talking about Lego again because Eric didn't want to deal with this either. "So maybe you should go and talk to him?" I suggested. "Maybe him and Tray?"

"No, I think it's fine" Eric said. "He looked at a magazine cover; it's not the end of the world."

"Mmm, I think _maybe_ it might be a good idea to discuss it with him generally. I mean, he's got proof of its existence, so maybe he needs to understand that it's not a…well, you know. Same thing I had to tell Amelia. It's not real." I looked at Eric, he looked at me. Barring Felicia bursting in again, this little showdown could go on for a while.

Luckily, though, I'd already proven myself battle-toughened by winning the silent war with Bill. I could wait this out, I thought.

Except that Eric decided to just leave the room. So bugger. That didn't work.

EPOV

To top off a day which had had it's truly fucking awful moments, Sookie decided that I needed to explain to Sam that porn was wrong. I think Sam knew it was kind of wrong, because he'd been skulking about trying to get a look at it, instead of dragging the box into the living room and picking out which magazine he wanted to read.

So I thought that maybe the whole conversation would be redundant. After all if he knew he shouldn't be looking at it, me telling him he shouldn't be looking at it wasn't going to achieve anything, except maybe to make it more fucking appealing.

And it wasn't like he didn't know about sex. We'd had that talk already, although I wasn't entirely sure that I'd really got the message through to Sam and Tray on that one. When I'd asked them if they'd had any questions Tray had checked whether he was allowed a cookie for sitting still for so long and Sam had just looked at me for a very long time before finally saying "So…_she_ lets _you_ do that?" I really didn't think these kind of talks were one of my specialist subjects. I was even better with the fucking Lego than I was at talking about this kind of shit.

So, fuck it. They'd be fine. Until, of course, the day they brought home a girl who looked like she'd stepped out of one of those magazines and then Sookie would fucking hate me forever.

Oh, fuck. Why couldn't anything be fucking simple around here?

Sam and Tray were in my room, or their room, or whatever the fuck it was. Tray had opened up his model kit, spread it all over the floor, and was about to start opening the glue that came with it.

"No" I said.

"No?" he asked. "But I'm not using the table."

"I don't think the bedroom carpet is a terrific idea either. And it's not that long until bed."

"I'm not tired" Tray insisted, as if I would let him sit there all fucking night and glue his fingers together.

"No" I said again, hoping that covered it. Tray sighed and starting putting pieces back in the box, looking less than thrilled that I'd discovered his plans for the evening.

Now I just had to figure out what to say to Sam. "So, uh, your mom…" I started. "Mum" Sam corrected, without really looking at me. "Mum, then. You were, uh, in our room?"

"Yeah" Sam said. "So tomorrow, you're just taking the girls out? To get what they want?"

"Um…I guess so" I said.

"I'm staying here to build this" Tray informed us both.

"Yeah, but, uh, getting back to the magazines…" I said.

"What magazines?" Tray asked. He looked at Sam, who blushed slightly and looked down at the bed he was sitting on, and then up at me.

"The ones in the box. In the bedroom" I said. Tray shrugged.

"So, um…well. I know they're interesting, but…" I tried, but Tray butted in. "They're weird. The women look odd. Not like the ones in the other magazines, the ones Mum and Amelia read that are full of like…I dunno."

During Tray's little speech, Sam had been looking around. Possibly for another exit as I was still mostly in the doorway. But, short of throwing himself out the window he was out of luck. Although it wasn't that big a drop once you got over the sill.

Yeah, fuck. It wasn't like I hadn't done that once. Or twice.

"Well, see, that's the thing" I said to them. "Your, uh, mum wants you to know that they're not real. What's in there. So…OK. That's what I wanted to tell you."

Sam frowned. "What's not real?" he said.

"The women. In the magazines." I thought we'd covered that. "They're uh…well, models." That seemed to be a fairly neutral description.

"So they're plastic?" Tray asked. "Like my Corvette?"

"Um…" I said, trying to think of how to put it. "They're um, made to look more, um, enticing. But it's not real, and it's not interesting and you don't have to worry about it for a very long time." I was just about to walk out when Sam spoke.

"If it's not interesting, then why do they make the magazines?" Sam asked.

"Oh, well. They're interesting, but they're not real" I said. "So, just remember that."

"But the magazines are real, aren't they?" Sam asked. He looked confused. I wondered if I should go and get Sookie to take over because we seemed to be going in circles here. I didn't get what the problem was.

"Mmm, they are. But they're not really…well, just stay away."

"Why?" Sam asked. Fuck, really? I thought he well passed the 'why' stage now.

"Because. Just because."

"Stay away from what?" Tray asked. "The magazines, or the plastic women?"

"Um…both, I guess" I said. "But the women aren't plastic, they're just…um…well, mostly it's saline…"

"What?" Tray asked.

"Never mind" I told him. That was a whole other fucking can of worms I didn't want to open.

"I still don't get it. I mean, why are they here if no one is supposed to look at them?" Sam asked, and he gave me that look of his, the one that fucking suggested there was something fishy and he thought I was at the bottom of it.

"Someone left them here" I said. "Like, um, the books that Amelia found. So, clearly, whoever that was found those magazines interesting. And that's their problem. But it's not real, and real women don't look like that, or act like that, so don't pay too much attention to them." I think that covered it. Sure, we'd had a few false starts, but we'd got there in the end.

"What do you mean, act like that?" Sam asked.

Fuck.

"Um…well if you look at some of the pictures…then, um. OK, so they're meant to be…um…fuck." I stopped. Sam and Tray just looked at me. I wondered if I should just leave this room as well and hope the subject was dropped. Forever. Because, fuck, it wasn't going fucking well as a topic of conversation at the moment.

"The women aren't real, and you aren't supposed to look at them and they do stuff that isn't like…normal?" Sam asked trying desperately to paraphrase the confusing conversation we'd just been having. Fuck, it really didn't make a lot of sense.

"Are they superheroes then?" Tray asked.

"No" I said, happy I could answer that one. Tray lost interest.

I sat down on the bed and tried to think it all through again. Fuck, I couldn't really get it straight in my head.

"Are you not supposed to look at them because, um…they're not really wearing clothes?" Sam asked, his voice dropping in volume to just above a whisper.

"That's kind of the point of looking at them" I said, and Sam blushed again. "That's um, why the photos are like that." Poor Sam looked more confused than ever. "You just…it's OK to want to look" I said.

"But you said it wasn't" Sam accused.

"Well…I just meant, it's OK to want to look, it's perfectly natural, you know, because of…well, sex…" Sam looked even more mortified. Tray looked up briefly and then went back to what he was doing. "It's kind of a given, that you'll want to look at naked women, but the women in those magazines, they're not like real women. And real women are better."

Sam frowned and wouldn't make eye contact. Tray ignored both of us. After a while Sam said "So they're bad, those magazines?"

"They're not bad; they're just, um…well they're a fantasy. They take those photos so they look…um, appealing. There's lots of…stuff, like that around. But none of it's real. You just have to remember that. Real girls…real women, they, um…they're better." I think that summed it all up, and I was kind of fucking pleased with that explanation, which hadn't involved superheroes, plastic or any of the other shit that had somehow got dragged into the conversation.

"Real women are better" Tray announced "Because you could actually touch them, eh Dad?"

Oh, fuck. Why did he have to pay attention to me only in random bursts? "Yeah" I said. "I guess."

"And Mum lets you touch her" Tray said. I think Sam and I both looked uncomfortable at that statement. "So that's better. Plus, she makes dinner. Although sometimes she makes broccoli, and I don't like broccoli. I think it's really something else and she's just tricking me."

"No, broccoli is always broccoli, Tray. And you have to eat it if your mother makes it."

"Well…that sucks" Tray said, and he went back to arranging action figurines on the floor. I watched Sam who looked first thoughtful, and then horrified.

"What's wrong?" I asked him, realising that I would probably fucking kick myself for doing so.

"Oh, nothing" Sam said. "Just, um, that whole thing…where you touch them…and that's why you don't need to look at the magazine-women, because you know…Mum…and stuff…and it's Mum."

"Mmm" I said. Which I'm pretty sure covered every fucking thing I needed to say on that point. "So, we're clear? That it's quite OK to want to look at those pictures, but just don't forget that it's not the real thing. And real women are better. Plus, what if it was one of your sisters in the pictures?"

Sam looked like he might throw up at that thought. I wasn't thrilled with it either; it had been bad enough when Amelia and Felicia had decided to wash the Corvette in their swimsuits. But hopefully it would keep Sam away from any porn for the foreseeable future, so I figured the fucking horrific mental images we were now left with was all for a good cause.

"OK, so another half-hour and then lights out, OK guys?" I said to them, and they both nodded and muttered OK. I stood up and started to walk out, but Sam called out "Dad?"

"Yeah?" I said looking at him again.

"You like Mum better, don't you? Than the women in the magazines?"

At least that was fucking easy to answer. "Yes" I said. "Yes I do. Like I said, real women are always better." I walked out just as Tray said "And Mum probably lets him actually touch her boobs", to which Sam yelled "Shut up, Tray!" Yep, Sam was pretty much scarred forever at this point. Tray, maybe not.

But I'd worry about him later.

I went back to Dad's room, or our room, feeling pretty pleased I'd accomplished what I'd set out to accomplish. I thought Sookie would be pretty pleased with me too. Except that after I told Sookie I'd done it, she didn't congratulate me, instead she said "You know, something occurred to me earlier, when I was packing up those magazines."

"What?" I asked, wondering why we were still discussing it.

"Yeah" Sookie said. "I kind of looked at some of the dates. They're from a, um, _very_ specific time-period. Like, only a couple of years. Which is kind of weird, don't you think?"

"Well, no" I said. "Mostly I try not to think about my Dad's porn."

"Well, see. That's the thing. I would have thought, although I'm not the expert, that there'd be a, um, bigger spread of dates…if he'd been keeping his favourites for a while, that is. Or that they'd be really recent, if he's been getting rid of them over the years…so you know, seemed a bit odd." Sookie looked at me, and she was trying really fucking hard not to smile.

I shrugged. "Maybe it was a phase he went through? Maybe those were his favourites, and he liked, you know, women from that time."

"Mmm" Sookie said, nodding enthusiastically and smiling quite broadly now. "Like Pamela Anderson. I noticed she featured a few times."

"What? Oh, fuck. Alright. They were mine. I put them under the bed to get them away from Amelia when she found the box. I meant to get rid of them, but someone stole all the goddamned trash bags and the dumpster wasn't here yet." Fuck. I didn't have much choice but to confess.

Sookie looked delighted. "Hah!" she said, pointing at me. "Busted, busted, busted!" she chanted, jumping up and down on the spot while still pointing at me. Yeah, real women were definitely better, but I wasn't sure that Sam would really appreciate being called in here for a demonstration of why I thought that, about his mother. That'd be the cause of some mental scars I didn't think we could ever get rid of.

I shrugged. I didn't think it was that big a deal really.

SPOV

I'd been dying to tell Eric what I'd figured out about that magazine stash and when I did, he looked at first affronted, and then defensive as he tried to shrug it off. After all those years of him going on and on about my 'little books of porn' this was my chance to finally get my own back.

"So" I said, as casually as I could. "I guess this is where I offer to, you know, act out anything you wanted from them? From your pretty picture-books of porn?" I looked at Eric who was still trying to pretend I hadn't really found him out.

"No" he said. "No, I've just been telling Sam that real women are better, so you know, they are. You can just be you."

"Mmm" I said. "You know, you _say_ that, and yet…" I picked up a magazine out of the box which was on the bed still, "You have _all_ these magazines with women doing all sorts of things. I'm sure there's something in there you've thought about. For years." I smiled at Eric.

Eric didn't do anything for a minute and I thought I'd got him, but then he took a step forward and picked up another magazine and started flicking through it. "Well, there is this one spread in here…" he said. "With, um…well the hot tub. The two women in the hot tub. The ones who can't keep their hands off each other. That would be a good one to start with."

I tried to keep a straight face, but there must have been a momentary flash of panic when I wasn't sure if he was kidding or not. "Hah!" Eric said, throwing the magazine down. "You looked like Sam did!"

"What? When you were describing your fantasies about lesbians to him?" I asked. Eric had started walking towards me, but I backed away. Of course I had nowhere really to go other than around the side of the bed and smack, bang up against the bedside table. Before I knew it Eric was standing right in front of me. He took the magazine I had out of my hands and threw it down on the bed too.

"I was telling him how much hotter you were, than the women in those magazines" he said. And while maybe I should have been worrying about poor Sam, mostly I was just pleased Eric fancied me. Call me shallow.

"Really?" I said, as archly as I could manage.

"Definitely" Eric said, as he invaded my personal space.

"You might have to show me" I suggested, as Eric's hands snuck around to pull me against him. He kissed me, and that was a pretty good way of showing me. He probably had other ideas too, but then Tray burst in said "Oh" and walked out again, leaving the door open. I could hear him yelling "Yeah. He was. Gross!" as he walked back down the hallway.

Eric sighed. "Maybe we'll make sure everyone's in bed first. And the door is locked. Then I'll show you."

"Promise?" I asked.

"Promise" Eric said.

**A/N So I should have said a couple of chapters back, but the whole use of 'pools' as a plural (even if there's one pool) is a Kiwi-ism which Eric picks Sookie up on in this chapter. I don't know why we say it like that. Possibly we live in the hope that when we get there it'll really be a whole water park resort-type thing, and not just the Papatoetoe Centennial Pool. As a side-note, I lived over the fence from the Papatoetoe Centennial Pool between the ages of 12 and 17 and that was pretty cool, because I got to go there a lot. In the days before kids had cellphones, Mum could yell if she needed me home!**

**Thanks for reading!**


	42. Chapter 42

**A/N Hello! Yes, I'm still here. I'm just all out of whack due to school sucking up a lot of my time. My daughter survived the school cross-country race. Didn't finish anywhere, but did look fetching in her house colours. And now we are up to Easter this weekend (Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays here) and then two weeks of school holidays. So I have no idea if/when I'll be writing. Mostly I suspect I'll be wiping chocolate off the toddler and watching endless Barbie movies while going slowly insane...**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

The Pam problem persisted. And, despite the natty alliteration, it wasn't really that much fun. In actual fact I wasn't even really sure it could be categorised as a Pam problem. It was more like a Pam and Eric problem. And as much as I wanted to tell Eric to build a bridge and get over it, that never worked. Building bridges wasn't really Eric's style. I suspected that if left to his own devices, Eric was more the blow the bridge up and get the hell out before bits of bridge fell on his head type.

Pam deigned to join her sisters and Eric for their trip to the shops, leaving me to try to supervise Tray and Sam in a last-ditch attempt clear up the room they were staying in. It didn't work and in sheer desperation I found myself packing up all the knick-knacks in the living room. Surely Eric wouldn't want all the crappy ornaments that were around and we could just give those to the Salvation Army, or whoever it was that was going to get all the unwanted stuff?

But by lunchtime Eric was back with his little tribe. You could hear Amelia and Felicia before they ever made it inside the house. "You just want everything your own way, Amelia!" Felicia yelled.

"No! That's you!" Amelia yelled back. "You're the one who wanted a phone! And Dad said no! You can't get a new phone! I haven't got a new phone!"

"You don't need a new phone!" Felicia countered.

"Neither do you! You're just selfish!" A couple of doors slammed and it went reasonably quiet. Eric walked into the living room, but there was no sign of Pam. I assumed she'd gone next door to show Miriam what she'd got.

"So…did it go alright?" I asked.

Eric shrugged and looked around at the boxes I had out. "You're, um…we're not taking that, are we?" he asked.

"Well, no" I said. "But I assume that at some point it'll go…somewhere else. Have you figured that out yet?"

Eric shrugged again, and poked around in a box, eventually coming up with the world's ugliest ship in a bottle. The ocean wasn't that bizarre shade of aqua, for a start.

I didn't want to badger Eric, I really didn't. But I was pretty much at the end of my tether. "We need to get it sorted, Eric" I said. "We need to figure out what's happening here so we can go home again because I, for one, don't want to spend the rest of my life living here. It's like camping, I don't have my own stuff and there isn't enough room for us all." Having said my piece, I waited for Eric's reaction. He just kept staring at his ugly ship on its plastic sea of white-capped waves.

"But you like camping" he said in the end.

"Not here" I said.

"So…you don't like the States?" Eric asked, his eyes narrowing. He seemed to be taking it personally.

"I just…well, you moved. For a reason" I pointed out. "I didn't think we were moving here. Forever."

"I didn't suggest you come here" Eric said.

"No" I said. "No, you didn't." And then I left Eric in the living room, with his horrible stupid ship that was all out of proportion, and the floral wallpaper and the too-small sofa and the carpet with all its stains and nothing that was mine, and I walked into the kitchen, where nothing was mine either.

I was homesick. And very, very fed up.

Tray wandered in. He was mine, I supposed. I was kind of annoyed by him too though, and he unfortunately didn't realise that until he got a very sharp "Soon!" in response to a question about how long it was until lunch and he left again.

Well, fine. They could all wander off. I was stuck here, trying to think of something to make for lunch in a kitchen that wasn't mine and with only the ingredients that were left from the last shopping trip and which really didn't amount to anything much. Probably no one would even eat it. And then they'd whinge, and, worse, they'd all look at me because, God knows, it was my job to be able to produce three edible meals a day and the little problem of this not being the our house in the actual country we lived in shouldn't really matter to me, should it? No, I just didn't try hard enough, that was my problem.

Eric came in, still with the horrible ship in a bottle. "You know" he said. "We should be sorting all this stuff out." I didn't say anything to that. It wasn't news to me.

"So, uh…where are we putting the things we're taking home?" Eric said, holding up the bottle.

"That?" I asked, nodding at it.

"Mmm" Eric said. "I always liked this ship."

I was absolutely speechless. Which was probably lucky, because if I still had had the ability to talk I might have pointed out that I never, ever wanted that ugly ship in a bottle in my house and at least Bill had had the decency to confine himself to taking one small crystal decanter from the pile of crap his grandmother had left behind despite the fact Lorena had been more than annoyed by the fact he hadn't taken the 'lovely' Royal Albert tea set which Portia desperately wanted and which Bill, as eldest, somehow got first dibs on. But no, Eric wanted some bloody stupid ship that would never sail on a fake looking ocean with tiny plastic dolphins. More to the point, that was his total contribution to the sorting out of the house to date, working out which ugly ornament went home with us. Assuming we went home.

"So…where?" Eric prompted, and it took me a couple of moments longer to regain my power of speech, which was even more lucky as I had a whole list of places I could tell him where to put that stupid ship.

But in the end I didn't. "Have to find a box, I guess" I said, and then I turned away and started looking in the fridge, hoping he'd just leave me the hell alone.

And that was when the Eric and Pam problem got eclipsed by the Eric and Sookie problem. Or maybe it was just a Sookie problem. I didn't know. I just knew I wasn't particularly happy and I wanted my old life back and Eric seemed to be the biggest obstacle to achieving that.

EPOV

At times like this, it was abundantly clear who Pam took after. They all did, in their own ways, each one of them reflecting some facet of Sookie. All morning I'd had to put up with Amelia trying to organise what everyone else got, and Felicia arguing with any suggestions put forward. But it was Pam who was the most like Sookie. Pam wasn't arguing with her sisters all that much and she clearly wasn't fucking talking to me.

And neither, it appeared, was Sookie. Currently she was staring at the inside of the refrigerator as if a magic portal to New Zealand would open up and whisk her home. I wasn't sure when she'd decided she hated it so much here. And I wasn't sure why I was bearing the brunt of it. And I couldn't be completely sure that what I took to be her dislike of the place wasn't actually just a deflection of the fact she didn't particularly like me at the moment. And that was a fucking awful thought.

Sure, she was helping out with the house but I could distinctly remember buying her fucking flowers the day before, to thank her for that. I might have let Tray pick, and he might have bought the weirdest fucking flowers in the world, and I might have avoided telling him why they looked so fucking weird in the hopes of avoiding a discussion that would have been ten times more uncomfortable than the one I'd had where I'd managed to tell Sam that his mother's real boobs were better than any pictures of boobs he might see. But I still thought the flowers fucking counted.

Sookie didn't though. In the same way that Pam didn't think her new Barbie beauty parlour, or whatever the fuck it was in the pink box I'd handed my credit card over for, counted either. Sure, she could fucking take the gift, but it didn't mean she wanted to talk to me.

They were both as fucking bad as each other.

I wasn't sure what to do to make it better. So I did nothing. Well, I went to find a box to put the ship in a bottle in. I'd always liked the ship in a bottle; it had been on the shelf behind the sofa. The shelf I wasn't allowed to touch, and when my mom had found me standing on the sofa to get a better look, that hadn't gone down fucking well at all.

I was starting to wonder if this goddamned house just turned women against me.

SPOV

I tried to talk myself out of feeling so miserable and annoyed, I really did. After all, Eric had been through a lot. His, um…well, inertia was probably the best word. Or maybe it was procrastination? I tried to banish the term laziness from my head, but failed. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was understandable, after all. And I understood. I understood more than anyone, in a way.

But I didn't have to like it, did I?

No, I figured that in my own mind, I was pretty much free to think all sorts of things about Eric, the United States and how much bloody work wasn't getting done. That was definitely allowed.

So I listened as Eric walked off and I kept staring the fridge. There wasn't a lot. And the bread was getting old and…bugger it. I'd do eggs on toast.

Eggs on toast always meant a lot of fussing over how everyone wanted their eggs done, and then you had to go through the rather painful process of Tray trying to swap the white part of his fried eggs for the yolks of someone else's, except that everyone else who had chosen fried eggs wanted their yolks and those who had scrambled eggs weren't any good to him anyway. In the end to put him out of his misery and to stop him hounding his siblings, I gave him the yolk from one of my eggs. Eric kind of frowned at that, but it wasn't like he was offering any of his own food was it?

Pam was still next door. She probably had the right idea.

After lunch I announced I was going to the supermarket and waited to see what Eric's reaction would be. He'd been watching me warily since we sat down to lunch, but I wasn't sure what he was hoping to see. At least he wasn't clutching that stupid ship anymore, so that was an improvement.

In the end his only question was "Do you know where you're going?"

"The GPS does. I guess" I said, as I picked up my handbag and shopping list and didn't really make eye contact with Eric. "I'll see you later on." And then I walked out into the sunshine. Seriously, did it never rain here? The lawn was dry and neglected and it could really use a good drenching.

Pam and Miriam were playing hopscotch on Miriam's driveway and Pam looked over at me. "Where are you going?" she asked.

"Supermarket" I replied.

"By yourself?" Pam asked, like she wasn't sure Eric would really let me leave my little weatherboard prison anytime soon.

"Yeah" I replied.

"Can I come?" Pam asked, and then she turned and saw Miriam's expression. "Oh" she said. Pam did love supermarket shopping, and I guess this would be a whole new supermarket for her to explore. Me, I tolerated the process because, quite frankly, the alternative where there was no food or toilet paper in the house was less than palatable.

"Well…can Miriam come too?" Pam asked. I wasn't sure if that was really top of Miriam's list for the afternoon, but two kids were no worse than one.

"If her mum says it's OK" I said, walking closer to where they were.

Pam sighed. "She's a mom!" she insisted. I ignored her, as long as she didn't try to insist that I was one, that was fine with me. Miriam ran off into her house yelling "Mom! Mommy!" which did prove Pam's point, I guessed, and then pretty quickly she was back outside running towards Pam and smiling.

I figured we were good to go then.

Luckily on the drive to the supermarket the girls were mostly interested in each other and didn't notice my short-cut which was actually a wrong-turn, and the resulting double-back I had to do. If I'd had Amelia in the car with me she would have been predicting doom, gloom and the imminent death of us all in a fiery car-accident after that. But not Pam, Pam was far too busy with the whispering and giggling with Miriam.

Did five year old girls always whisper that much? I tried hard to remember, but the last nine years had been a bit of a blur and I couldn't for the life of me remember what Amelia's friendships had been like. I just had an impression of Amelia as a smaller, but no less bossier version of herself. So not much had changed then.

Finding the supermarket turned out to be the easy part of the trip though. Finding anything in the supermarket was bloody hopeless. I tried to utilise the help I had with me, but getting the girls to find anything for me invariably turned into an opportunity for Pam to launch into some big lecture to Miriam about how "Capsicums are really just peppers, but Mum uses a weird word for them", like I was the only foreign one in the family. Miriam smiled and nodded politely and looked utterly enthralled with everything Pam said, and was especially enthusiastic when it was time to pick cereal and Pam said Miriam could choose "Because she's from here."

And so I pushed my shopping trolley around the aisles and down some of them two or three times, followed by two small girls who held hands and skipped and I didn't feel any better about being here. Maybe you had to be Pam? And maybe you had to have found a Miriam? They did make a nice couple I had to admit, with Pam being so strikingly fair she contrasted with Miriam's big dark eyes and dark curly hair quite nicely.

And that was a really weird thought to have about two little girls I decided. But I'd had a lot of weird thoughts today. My brain was all over the place, although mostly it just seemed to be stuck in feeling sorry for Sookie mode and I wished I could get it out of it.

I wished I could go home too. Where were some ruby slippers when you needed them? Or, in fact, pasta sauce?

"Can you guys find the pasta sauce?" I asked. Pam blinked at me and Miriam smiled. "It's over there" she said smiling, and Pam smiled back at Miriam, impressed by her cleverness. And then they skipped off.

EPOV

Just after Sookie left, the dumpster arrived. The boys came out to watch it being unloaded and I had to make sure that Tray didn't get squashed as they lowered it onto the front yard. Then when they left I had to make sure that he didn't actually get in the truck and go with the guys who'd delivered it, he was so fucking interested in how the truck worked he'd practically climbed into the driver's seat before they took off.

But even with the dumpster in place, I was still at a loss for what to do next. I mean, I knew what I was supposed to be doing. Putting stuff in the dumpster. But how you got to that point, how you figured out what went when none of it had been your shit in the first place, I didn't know. I hoped Sookie did. I thought I'd have some coffee and wait for her to get back, but first I had to deal with Felicia who was threatening to put Tray in the dumpster if he looked at her like that again.

"You can't put your brother in a dumpster" I told her, and she gave me a fucking annoyed scowl. "Not one we've rented anyway. If you're going to dump him somewhere, make sure it's somewhere that can't be traced back to this house."

"So…I'm allowed to kill him for being an annoying little shit, I just can't get you in trouble for it?" Felicia asked, as Tray tried to pretend he wasn't really worried about what Felicia might do to him.

"Yeah. That sounds correct" I told her.

"So don't piss me off again, Tray" Felicia warned, pointing a finger at him in the same way Sookie always did when she was telling the kids off.

"All I did was say that girls aren't any good at skateboarding because their boobs make them fall over. But you don't have boobs! So you're OK" Tray explained. Yeah, I'd ended up buying Felicia a skateboard that morning, after she'd finally understood that she was not, under any circumstances, getting a new phone. I figured she'd decided that if Tray could learn how to skateboard, then she'd have no problem. And from what I'd seen, she'd been correct. She was pretty good at it. Tray was still shit. Tray didn't seem to be taking it well.

"I'm going to hit you with the skateboard" Felicia threatened. Tray looked confused about what he'd done. I decided they'd work it out themselves and I really did need coffee about now.

Amelia came in while I was pouring a cup. "Can I have some?" she asked, and I nodded. After she served herself she sighed noisily and looked at me. "I'm bored" she announced. "I'm fed up with hanging around here. There's nothing to do and there's no one to talk to."

"We went out this morning. And there are plenty of people to talk to" I said, and Amelia gave me the 'you don't know what you're talking about' look.

"Bored, bored, bored" she sighed.

"Plus your _boyfriend _put that photo up on Facebook that showed him going to the movies with that other girl" Felicia said as she walked into the kitchen.

"Shut up Leesh!" Amelia yelled, which gave me some very unpleasant flashbacks to that morning's shopping trip. "Anyway, he was with a group."

"That's the official cover story" Felicia explained to me.

"Grow up" Amelia grumbled. And then they both sighed in unison and looked over at me. I didn't care what the fuck Riley had or hadn't done so I hoped they didn't want my opinion on the matter.

"I'm still bored" Amelia said again, like I was supposed to have done something about that in the time we'd all be standing here. "Really bored."

"I miss home" Felicia said, like that fact surprised her. "And my stuff. And not having to share a room, and a bed, with Pam. She takes up all the space!"

I looked at them, and I remembered my earlier thought about how if you put all the girls together you got something approaching Sookie. So if I put together the fact that Amelia was bored, Felicia was homesick and Pam was just fucking annoyed with me on general principle, I got, what exactly? And, more importantly, what the fuck could I do about it anyway? Did I just send Sookie home on the next plane to Auckland? Sookie and the kids?

I didn't want to though, that was the truth of it. I fucking hated having to deal with the house and the shit in it as it was and the thought of being alone here and doing it was terrifying. So that wasn't an option. At least, not one I wanted to consider.

I went out to look at the dumpster again. I'd maybe ordered one that was too large for our needs. Or not. What if I just put everything that was in the house in it and then that was fucking that?

I didn't want to do that either.

Tray and Sam had meanwhile decided to use it as part of a game they invented and were standing there taking turns to see if they could throw sticks into it.

"So this is for the rubbish?" Sam asked. I nodded, and sipped some of my coffee.

"Can we chuck it in there?" Tray asked, as he hurled another stick.

"I, uh…we haven't figured it out yet" I said. "What's going in there. What's not. We need to do that."

"Oh" Sam said. "Are we waiting for Mum?"

"Yep" I confirmed. That seemed to be a good plan at that point in time.

Sam screwed up his face. "I think she's a bit pissed off about it" Sam said.

"About what?" I asked.

"Oh, you know. About the stuff that needs to go in the bin. I don't think she wants to do that. She was grumbling about it, and then she just keeps telling us to put stuff in boxes because someone had better be doing something."

Tray nodded. "I'm taking the desk lamp" he announced.

"It doesn't fit in the box" Sam informed him.

"Nah" Tray said. "It does now. I found that screwdriver set in the garage. I'm taking those too."

Sam looked at him. "D'you reckon you can put it back together?" he asked, throwing another stick.

Tray looked thoughtful. "Yeah. Nah. Dunno." He shrugged. "I'll have a go though, eh?" He threw another stick. Maybe that was the key? You just have to give these things a try? Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I just started going through everything and stopped thinking about how much there was to go through?

Maybe I could have help. "Who wants to make this interesting?" I said, nodding at the dumpster.

SPOV

When I got back to the house the biggest skip I had ever seen was now perched on the front lawn. It was probably a good thing that grass was already dead because I couldn't imagine having a large, metal container the size of a boat sitting there was going to be doing it any good.

"What's that?" Pam asked me.

"Bin" I said. "To put all the crap in. The crap we're not taking home. Which is most of the crap. Some of the crap we're going to donate, I guess, but that's the next step."

Pam looked bewildered. "Why is there so much crap?" she asked.

"Beats me" I replied. "And I don't get the ship in a bottle thing either." That went totally over Pam's head and she got out of the van along with Miriam. "Well, we're going back to Miriam's house. Her mum…mommy is going to let us help her make cookies."

"Uh-huh" I said, "That's nice." I watched Tray throw what looked to be an entire desk drawer into the bin. Eric said something that sounded like "I meant just the fucking contents, Tray", to which Tray possibly replied "But you said the more you put in, the more points you get!" I pulled out some shopping bags and went over to see what was happening.

Amelia arrived, with her arms full of really tacky ornaments, the ones that had been stashed in the bedroom she was sleeping in. "These are so ugly" she commented as she showed them to Eric. "No one here has any taste!" I waited to see if Eric would take offence to that, but he didn't, he just nodded and she handed a couple each to Sam and Tray and they all threw them in. Eric called out some numbers and Amelia disappeared into the house again with Tray and Sam hot on her heels.

"So…um, you're throwing stuff out?" I asked.

"Yep" Eric confirmed, as Felicia brought out a broom. "We'll need that" Eric pointed out, and Felicia frowned. "Not me" she said, and she disappeared back inside the house again.

"They're helping?" I asked him.

"Yep" he said again, as Tray and Sam appeared with what looked like old textbooks which they hurled with a fair amount of enthusiasm and competition. They looked at Eric expectantly, and he said some more numbers before they ran off, Tray counting on his fingers as he ran.

"So what did you promise them?" I asked him, wondering if he was up for another shopping trip in the near future.

Eric put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer. I looked at him and he smiled. "Home" he said. "I promised them home. Apparently it's a powerful motivator as no one is particularly thrilled with the idea of being here much longer." Well, he was right about most of us. Pam, though, I wasn't so sure about. Still it seemed to be working for him. "Plus" he added. "There's an arbitrary points system awarded for the stuff you can throw in."

Felicia appeared and threw a chair. "That's worth the most, isn't it?" she asked.

"That was a chair, Felicia. We could have donated it" I pointed out. She shrugged. "It was broken" she said, and she walked off.

"I don't think it was broken before" I commented, but Eric didn't seem too fazed. "Ten" he called after her, and she turned and gave him a thumbs-up.

"Really?" I asked. "Because I'm sure you were handing out twenty points for the books."

Eric shrugged. "I said it was arbitrary, as long as they keep going, what the fuck do I care?"

"Care about what?" Sam asked.

"Uh…just keep working Sam" Eric said, as Sam threw in the faux-Tiffany lampshade that was missing half its glass panels.

"Do I get points for the good breaking glass noise?" Sam asked.

"Yeah" Eric said. "Take an extra two points." Sam ran back inside.

"So…all you had to do was promise them home?" I asked.

"It works really fucking well, which I guess tells us their lives aren't as shit as they like to pretend" Eric said nodding, as a large wall-mirror walked out of the house with Tray's feet poking out from the bottom of it. "No" Eric said, and Tray's head appeared around the side. "But Sam said there's points for broken glass noises?"

"There's points for not trashing stuff we could give away too" Eric said.

"How many?" Tray asked.

"Five" Eric told him.

"Sweet" Tray said, and he shuffled around and carried the mirror back inside.

"OK, well I better get these inside" I said. "I think you've got this under control."

"I do" Eric said. "I just…well, thanks for the help before. When I didn't. I just…it's not something I really fucking wanted to do, I guess." He didn't look at me, keeping his eyes on the bin.

"Yeah" I said. "I know it is. It always sucks. But you don't have a choice."

"No" Eric said. "No, but it's nice to have help."

"It is" I agreed.

"And I'm keeping some of the stuff" he announced. I didn't want to think about what that might be, so I just nodded. Oh, well. He could keep that bloody ship if he wanted, in his office anyway. A couple of weeks and it would be hidden by a few piles of paper anyway.

"So now I've figured out that everyone just wants to get home, I'm feeling OK about it all" Eric said. "Because really, I think that's what I want too. More than anything. And if I have to do this shit to get there, then I'll do it." I looked at him. He did look better; well, better than he had done. A bit happier maybe. Less worried. Less stressed, perhaps. At any rate, it was nice to see.

"That's good" I said, and I put one of my shopping bags down and reached up to give him a kiss. I figured he should hold onto that good feeling while it lasted because as much as most of the family wanted to go home, there was one member of the family who wasn't going to like that very much at all.

And that might have been the end of the Sookie problem, but we were still stuck with the Pam problem. I didn't think Eric had the answer to that one, neither of us did. Because I for one, didn't want to confess to my fear at having to break the heart of my five year old daughter and have her hate me forever.

At that moment it seemed better to just pretend it was all OK, and hope she magically got over Miriam before we had to leave. Maybe I could get some points for that?

"Euw" Tray said, as he poked Eric in the side with a rusted set of BBQ utensils. I hadn't even seen a BBQ around here. "We started on the garage" Tray announced.

"That's great Tray" Eric said. "Five points for those."

"Six?" Tray countered.

"Sure, why not?" Eric asked, and I turned and started carrying the shopping into the house.

**Thanks for reading, and Happy Easter!**


	43. Chapter 43

**A/N Hello! Yes, I managed to write something, just don't ask how many Easter eggs and Barbie movies may have been used as bribes in order to get the peace and quiet in order to produce this :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, and neither are the eggs I've been eating, but she's two years old, she can't count how much the Easter Bunny brought, can she?**

EPOV

I might have been able to figure out how to get most of my dad's stuff out of the house and into the dumpster but I couldn't figure out what the hell to do about Pam. And I wasn't really sure that I had to do anything anyway. I mean, I'd tried to tell her it wasn't such a shit-hot idea to be running next door at all hours of the day and night and all that had fucking resulted in was Pam declaring a war of fucking silence against me and a slew of dirty looks from Sookie every time Pam appeared and tried to pretend I was dead.

So, I was shit out of ideas. I figured I'd just wait it out and ignore Sookie's mutters about how like me Pam was. She clearly wasn't a thing like me because if she was, I'd know why the fuck she was persisting in being such a little pain in the ass. But I didn't, and I didn't know why I was so clearly the fucking enemy when I just didn't want her getting fucking hurt when we had to go home.

In the meantime even the other kids had noticed. "Wow. Pam really doesn't like us anymore" Felicia commented, as we watched Pam skipping off down the front path in the direction of the house next door. Yeah, fuck. She really fucking didn't. I didn't answer Felicia, there wasn't much point. I decided I'd make coffee instead, assuming no one had put the coffeemaker in the trash in the hope you got extra points for making my life fucking miserable. But then I got a phone call and that cut my walk to the kitchen short.

SPOV

I was over the whole Eric and Pam drama, but then I was over a whole bunch of stuff. Including Eric suddenly disappearing on me to go and see his lawyer. At least, that's the story I got from Felicia when I asked her where he'd gone.

"Oh" I said. "Did he say why?" Felicia gave me a look that suggested she was confused about where I'd been for the last ten and a half years because when was the last time we ever got much of an explanation from Eric about anything. "Well, that's helpful" I commented.

"Yeah, not really" Felicia said, and then she walked off as well, leaving me to try to find someone else to talk to. I was bored, and it was kind of lonely here.

I was even missing Stan the cat.

I just wasn't expecting visitors, so the knock at the door an hour later, when I'd finally sat down on the old sun lounger I'd spent a good half an hour cleaning the cobwebs and dirt off, came out of the blue. I had briefly wondered whether I needed to be concerned about the actual spiders that might still be on the lounger, but had decided it would be fine. It wasn't Australia, and bitey things were probably thin on the ground.

But no sooner had I actually parked my bottom, than someone arrived at the house. I hesitated, hoping that maybe Amelia or Felicia might be curious enough to answer it. But no, the annoyed sounding doorbell ringing that set in soon afterwards showed me that that hadn't happened.

I walked back through the house and opened the door, to find Luna Garza standing there with a tape measure. "Oh good" she said. "You are here." I wondered how long it would have taken her to break in if I hadn't been.

"Um…" I said, as Luna attempted to walk over me and into the house. She was little, but she was helped by the fact she had that baby bump which just pushed me backwards.

"Oh" she said, and she held up the tape measure again. "Curtains. My mother bought fabric on sale and we need to know what we're making. Although I'm thinking about getting something special for the baby's room. Maybe teddy bears."

"Mmm" I said. "They grow out of teddy bears quite quickly though. Maybe go for something which will take them through childhood. Do you know what you're having?"

"Boy" Luna said, as she continued down the hall, with me following.

"Trucks?" I suggested, and she wrinkled her nose. "Dinosaurs?" It struck me that I'd somehow ended up being Luna's interior design consultant and I wasn't even sure about why I'd let her into the house.

Boredom and loneliness had a lot to answer for.

"I don't know" she said. "I kind of like the idea of zoo animals, something like that."

"Mmm" I said, considering it. It could be nice.

Luna walked all the way to the bedroom at the back which Amelia was using. "I'm busy" Amelia said, as Luna pushed open the door. "Go away."

"Amelia, Luna just wants to measure the windows" I said, and Amelia looked up from her laptop and frowned. "Why?" she demanded.

Yeah, that stumped me. I mean I understood she wanted to make curtains for the place, but, as far as I knew, this wasn't her place. Was it?

"I want to get them done before I move in" Luna said, as she manoeuvred her way between the bed and the window which wasn't easy given her current shape.

"Move in?" Amelia asked, which echoed my thoughts.

"Yeah" Luna said. "In about a week."

And that was how I figured out that Eric had actually sold the place. Which was nice. Might have been nice to know, of course, but you couldn't have everything.

"Dad didn't tell us!" Amelia complained. I shrugged. "Once, he forgot to tell me we were buying a house" I said to her.

Luna turned around from where she was stretching the tape measure across the window. "I wouldn't put up with that" she said. "I couldn't bear just finding stuff out as an afterthought."

"I did find out before we moved" I said. Amelia looked thoughtful. "Do I know about this house?" she asked.

"Yeah" I told her, and she gave up and went back to staring at her laptop. Luna finished measuring and moved on to the next bedroom, which happened to be the one the boys were in. There was no sign of them, but the floor was littered with, well, just about everything that Eric had once owned. And in the corner was a huge cardboard box, made of many smaller cardboard boxes. It appeared that every time Tray ran out of room for the stuff he wanted to take home, he just increased the size of the box he was using. We might have to put a stop to that, I thought.

Luna just stared at the crap on the floor. "Um, I'll just clear a path" I suggested, sort of pushing aside Lego and action figures and toy cars and a large pile of Monopoly money with my foot. I wanted to point out that it would pay to get used to kids' crap being strewn all around the place, but I didn't like to shatter the dreams of a new mother. I wasn't that bored.

Luna continued measuring. "I want to get the painters to come and measure too, so they can give me a quote" she said. "Although, it's Eddie's cousin, so it should be cheap, if you know what I mean."

"Yeah" I agreed. Luna didn't press me for anything else. "This is going to be the baby's room" she announced. "With new carpet."

"Sounds good" I said.

We continued on through the other rooms, until we got to the living room with its big picture window looking out onto the back yard. Luna sighed. "I don't think we'll have that much fabric" she muttered, and she set about measuring while I watched. It was really a job for two people though, and I ended up holding one end of the tape while she did the other and then wrote everything down in the small notebook she was carrying. Sam, Tray and Immanuel ran past, yelling quite loudly. They looked like they were throwing clumps of dirt at each other. Some hit the window and made Luna step back. Tray's knee seemed to be bleeding, but he'd been told that he was 'fine' by Eric so many times I suspected anything short of losing a limb wasn't really going to register with him.

I wanted to once again point out that this was all the stuff Luna had to look forward to, but I didn't. I was thinking that maybe she might stay and have a cup of tea with me when she was done. That could be nice.

And then Eric arrived back. "It's me" he yelled from the front door, about ten seconds before he walked into the living room and we got visual confirmation of that fact. He didn't seem that surprised to see Luna standing there with a tape measure.

"Do you want to hold it at the top?" I asked him, and he took my end and held it to the top of the window frame. The boys ran past again, still pelting each other with…well; I hoped it wasn't stones anyway.

"Luna's having a boy" I said, in order to break the awkward silence that was sort of clinging in the air now. Trust Eric to come home and ruin my chance to talk to someone, even if that someone was the slightly scary Luna.

"You have to run them. Like dogs" Eric said, nodding at the window and the trio disappearing around the side of the house.

Luna, who had crouched down to hold the tape against the bottom of the window screwed up her nose. "I don't think that's really necessary" she said, sounding a bit huffy. "I mean, they're not dogs for one thing. Children are different."

Eric and I exchanged a look. Well, I thought, you can't tell people before they have kids, can you?

I don't think Eric felt the same way. "No" he said. "They're worse. At least the fucking dog will heel." He would? Because that was news to me. Mostly Ivan thought heeling was optional, in the same way that he sometimes thought if you threw that stick, you didn't want that stick anymore and that was his stick now. It was only Eric he'd ever fetch for, and even then he was kind of reluctant about it. Ivan was not a credit to his breed.

Or maybe he just wasn't a credit to our house? I pondered that as the boys could be heard yelling around the front of the house, accompanied by the sound of metal being hit as stuff was thrown against the bin. At the other end of the house I could hear Amelia yell "Because it's PRIVATE, Felicia! That means keep your sticky beak out of my Facebook page or I will unfriend you, I really will!" The murmurs that, I assumed, were Felicia explaining the concept of privacy on the internet could be heard following that. Eric seemed unconcerned.

"So, you finished?" he asked Luna, kind of rudely.

She shrugged. "For now. I might need to come back though. And I'm sending the painters to look." Well, she was just as rude as he was really.

"Anytime" Eric said, sounding like he really didn't mean it at all.

"Thanks" Luna said, looking around and rolling her eyes. I wanted to say it wasn't my house or taste in décor, but surely she knew that.

We escorted Luna to the door and then Eric looked at me. "What?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing. Just that I didn't know you'd sold the house and then strange women turn up to measure for curtains."

Eric shrugged. "Well it's not really sold yet. They're going to rent it for a while until the deal can go through. That's what the lawyer wanted me for, he'd come up with this scheme with her lawyer. And I didn't know she was coming today to measure for them."

"OK" I said. "Do you think her husband knows she's bought the house? And the fabric to make curtains for it?"

Eric looked at me like I was mental. Guess he didn't care.

After lunch he went out to see about getting the rest of the furniture sent to a charity shop and I pottered around by myself all over again. It was getting really boring. I tried to interest Amelia and Felicia in going for a walk with me, but they didn't want to. Hanging around might have been boring, but hanging out with mum was just lame.

So I set off by myself. But I only got as far as the driveway of Miriam's house before her mum appeared. She looked a bit less scared of me than she had when we'd first arrived, so that was something.

"Hello" I said to her.

"Hi" she said back, and then she paused for a moment. "Do you want to come in?" she asked. "For some tea?"

"Oh, well that would be lovely" I said, thinking it really would be. Well, it was better than wandering around a strange neighbourhood by myself anyway.

I followed her inside the house, which, from the outside didn't look that different to Stan's house, but had definitely been redecorated sometime in the last few years. It was all cool tones, leather furniture, chrome fittings and recessed lighting. Very nice. I wondered briefly if Luna would have enjoyed busting in here to see what she could do with next door.

Rachel walked over to the fridge and pulled out a jug of something which she poured into two glasses and I got confused because I thought we were having tea and couldn't understand why she wasn't putting the jug on. And then I twigged. Sweet tea. Yeah, that weird thing some people drank over here.

Oh well. I guess it wouldn't hurt.

Boy, it was sweet though. I wasn't used to drinking anything that sweet and I had to suppress a shudder after my first sip. Rachel gestured to a table in a corner of the kitchen, and we sat down. I had been right though. Her house was nice. And there were no rampaging boys or screaming girls either, just the sound of Miriam and Pam giggling down the hallway.

Yep, I was coming to stay over here. Definitely.

Rachel looked like she wanted to say something, but wasn't sure how to do it. I decided to try small talk. "Your house is lovely" I said.

Rachel nodded. "It took a long time to get it right, the contractors were totally unreliable. But I'm pleased with it." Well, that gave me an in. We spent a few moments discussing our adventures in renovating, and Rachel seemed impressed with the fact that I had a brother in law who was a builder at my disposal. Of course that soon led into a small confusion about where this brother of Eric's was, followed by a disclosure about the paternity of all the kids, and a look of sudden realisation crossing Rachel's face when she worked out how I'd started with the dark-haired, slightly olive skinned Amelia and ended with the almost-transparent Pam.

I felt things were going quite nicely. It was good to be just chatting with someone. Even if I was stuck with a huge glass of this God-awful sweet tea.

After a few more minutes of general chit-chat Rachel got down to what I assumed was her point at the beginning. "So, uh, when exactly are you going back to New Zealand?" she asked.

"I think if it all goes to plan we're leaving at the weekend" I said. "Well, that's when I'm booked to go back with the kids. Eric's trying to get a ticket for the same flight, as his original booking was open-ended. So that's, what? Four more days." I braced, and took another sip. No, that was still like drinking golden syrup, which had been a trick of Jason's when we were kids and Mum would bake with it.

"Oh" Rachel said sadly. "Well, that's what I thought, but Pam said you were staying now. I thought it couldn't be the case, not with that big dumpster out the front. Unless you were renovating, perhaps." She sighed. "Miriam will be devastated" she said. Rachel looked like she might cry too.

"I know" I said. "I guess they'll have to, um…email. And stuff." I'd been about to say write each other letters, which had been what you did when I was that age, but I was seriously behind the times. I wondered briefly whatever had happened to that girl from Red Beach I'd started writing to after we met at a camping ground up north when I was about 7. It was sad to think that Miriam and Pam might lose touch like that. Better not to follow that line of thinking.

"I guess" Rachel said, slowly. "But it'll be very hard on Miriam. She doesn't um…well. There's no one else like Pam."

Well, there was only Eric and I figured Miriam didn't want to have tea parties with him. "They're very taken with each other" I said, nodding and hoping that Rachel didn't notice that I wasn't sipping my tea.

"They are" Rachel agreed. "It's so nice to see Miriam…so happy" she said, and she stared at her own tea.

"Well it's worked out well, hasn't it?" I asked. "I mean with it being the holidays…uh, summer vacation." I was getting pretty good at translating to American after all of these years.

Rachel looked thoughtful. "Miriam's had, um…a difficult time at school this year, so. Well, like I said. It's so nice to see her with Pam. Immanuel, he's different, you know?" I did know; less tea parties more throwing dirt. "But Miriam, I worry about her. And I worry about her losing Pam."

Oh crap. Now I felt responsible for Miriam's happiness as well as Pam's. I almost thought about offering to leave her here, after all four kids, five kids, what's the difference? But I'd miss her. Now we'd filled that hole in the family Eric had thought existed before we had Pam I didn't want it to be empty again. So no, Pam had to come with us when we left.

I wasn't sure what to say. There was nothing I really could say. Whatever happened, two little girls were going to be miserable come Saturday. And we couldn't do anything about it.

Motherhood really sucked.

I sighed. "I guess…they'll just have to make the best of the time they still have."

Rachel didn't look thrilled at that idea. I wasn't sure what else to suggest. "Maybe Pam could have a sleepover?" I suggested. "Before we go home?"

Rachel brightened slightly at that. "Oh" she said. "Well, that's a good idea. Miriam's wanted a sleepover for a long time, but there hasn't been anyone we could…" she stopped talking. I got the gist of it. Miriam was a little girl without a lot of friends who was going to be hit hard by Pam's imminent departure from her life. Yeah. I felt kind of stink about that really.

Rachel and I chatted for a bit longer and I made a valiant attempt on my glass of tea. And then I figured I'd pretty much stayed as long as I was welcome and I took my leave. "Just send Pam back when you've had enough of her" I said, which was possibly not the right thing to say to Rachel about then, as she looked sad at the thought of Pam leaving. Jeez. This was tricky.

So I walked back to Stan's house feeling a bit down about the whole thing. I was looking forward to going home, I was _really_ looking forward to going home, but I wasn't enjoying feeling like a heel for splitting up Pam and Miriam.

When I walked into the kitchen Eric was sitting there, drinking coffee and staring at his phone. He looked up at me and smiled. "I have a plan" he said, and, for a minute, I thought he meant about Pam and I was quite fond of him, and then he said "For your birthday" and I felt a bit deflated. It must have shown on my face.

"I don't think of you as old" Eric said, helpfully. It wasn't that helpful. Now I felt a bit stink about my birthday too. 45 was starting to sound old, especially when Eric wasn't even 40 yet. He wasn't even 39 for a couple more months. Sometimes being a cougar wasn't as much fun as Aunty Linda and Hadley seemed to think it was.

"Well thank-you" I said, somewhat grumpily. Eric looked like he was considering where he went wrong with his nice surprise for me. I wanted to tell him, but it would just lead us straight back to the whole 'build a bridge' thing. Whatever happened, leaving was going to suck for Pam. It was clearly going to suck for Miriam too, but she was going to have to be Rachel's problem. I was going to focus on Pam. I just wanted Pam to have as many people on her side as she could.

And that included her father. Eric cocked his head to one side. "You know" he said. "You really do look like you're still in your '30's."

"Thanks" I said, and then I went to gather up everyone's washing so I could get that done before Eric gave the washing machine away, or the boys hefted it into the bin in the hope of hitting the jackpot of points.

EPOV

Yep, this house was fucking cursed. They hadn't even been here two weeks yet and all the fucking women were pissed. Mostly at me, sometimes at each other, occasionally at inanimate objects if Sookie's tirade directed at the washer could be believed. In that instant, it might have been standing in for me. Who the fuck knew?

I noticed that not only had Pam set up a permanent encampment next door, but the boys were spending less and less time in the house as well, appearing mostly for meals and to occasionally display some kind of imaginary war-wounds when they felt like getting sympathy from Sookie. Other than that they could mostly be glimpsed through the window as they ran around, throwing shit at stuff with Immanuel trailing after them.

It was fucking tempting to just join them. But I couldn't imagine that going down well. Sookie wanted something from me, but I wasn't sure what. I'd thought it was some acknowledgment of her birthday, which she was going to end up celebrating over here. I'd been concentrating on the house for so long that it had fallen off my radar, but now that we were just about done with packing shit up, I thought about what we could do.

Sookie seemed fucking less than impressed though. She was tetchy about turning 45, which really, was just another fucking number when you looked at it. I didn't see it made that much difference, but clearly, it fucking did. I didn't have a magical way of turning back time though, so I just hoped she'd get the fuck over it when we actually got to the celebrating part.

Maybe though I should have been paying more attention to what the boys were up to, because they got some fucking weird ideas sometimes. Instead, while worrying about Sookie's reaction to turning 45, I let myself get dragged into a fight between Felicia and Amelia over fuck knows what. I suspected it was over the much debated fact of who the fuck could be the loudest and most annoying.

When I finally managed to extricate myself from that, pointing out that the washer was about to find a new home and any and all laundry would need to be done by hand and probably by whoever was currently giving me the most shit about looking at someone else's Facebook page, I noticed Sam. Well, I thought it was Sam.

"What happened?" I asked him.

"What?" he asked, and he looked around. Probably looking for Tray so he could blame him. That was usually Sam's first move if it looked like he was going to be pulled up for anything.

"The hair" I said. "What happened to your hair?" Last I'd heard, Sookie had been complaining that he wanted to grow it. Now it was all pretty much shaved off.

"Oh. Yeah. Immanuel did it. It's a lot cooler."

"Uh-huh. Sure it is. You let Immanuel do it?"

"Yeah. He had the clippers from when his mum did his. Plus it was free." Sam shrugged. "And you said we should take all the free stuff we could get."

"I think I'm being quoted out of fucking context" I pointed out, but Sam looked unconcerned. Sookie arrived at that point. "Have you seen Tray?" she asked.

"Do I want to?" I asked, because really, I wasn't fucking sure. And from the look on Sookie's face I was pretty sure that this was something else that was getting laid at my feet as well.

Sookie shrugged. "Well, I think the fact the letter T is shaved into the back is kind of a style statement. We should just be grateful that, and I'm quoting Tray here, 'his head is too small for the word awesome to fit on it'." I waited for her to say something about how I should have been watching them more closely but she didn't, instead she stared at the house next door and said "It is _really_ nice over there. I liked the sort of chocolate colour they'd done the dining area." Well, I didn't think Sam and Tray were exactly getting their free haircuts based on the décor of the fucking place; it wasn't like the violent-pink poodle salon, after all. So I was fucking stumped as to what was going through Sookie's mind at that point in time. And then she left anyway. Just like Pam who couldn't stand to be around me at the moment.

I hoped that maybe sex might get her to talk. So I offered her birthday sex early. She didn't seem to be completely pissed with me at least, because that was an idea that Sookie seemed more than happy to agree to. But afterwards she didn't really want to talk to me. Well not about whatever it was that she was pissed about. She just sighed, and cuddled me and said it was going to be tough to go home.

I was totally confused now, because it had only been a couple of days earlier that she'd been all about getting home, and getting home quickly.

Things changed fucking quickly around here. And not just the boys' hairstyles.

SPOV

For my birthday we went to Alcatraz. Well, first we drove to San Francisco, and that was only after Eric entered into protracted negotiations with the hire car company to get added as a driver to the agreement for the van I'd hired. Negotiations was probably a nicer term than was actually warranted. From the end of the conversation I could hear, there was a lot of repetition of the phrase "Do I sound like a New Zealander?" and similar phrases which got shorter and more to the point.

But in the end Eric won, although that probably shouldn't surprise me, and we left early in the morning and drove all the way to San Francisco. Pam still wasn't talking to Eric, but it was hard to tell because she slept for the first part of the journey. To be honest, I wasn't sure it was really bothering Eric anymore, he seemed to have moved on to lambasting the poor employees of car hire companies.

It bothered me though. It bothered me a lot. Was I the only one who could see how hard this was going to be for Pam?

Still, I was determined to enjoy my day out, and I really enjoyed Alcatraz, as odd as that sounded. I wasn't so keen on the ferry ride over to the island, and spent way too much time worrying unnecessarily that we were going to lose Tray over the side of the ferry, but the actual prison was kind of fascinating.

Amelia seemed mostly fascinated by the young guy there with his dad who were part of the group talking to visitors about the occupation of the site by the Native Americans in the late '60's. She kept drifting over to the display that they were standing in front of, and I overheard her trying to impress him with her limited knowledge of the Treaty of Waitangi and the various settlements awarded by the Waitangi Tribunal.

Felicia looked on and shook her head. "She's such a try-hard" she muttered to me. "She doesn't care anything about any of that crap; she's just trying to get him to notice her." Well yeah, she was. But I did kind of admire her for it, in the same way I'd admired Felicia's ability to hang with those boys at the pools.

Eric was less than impressed with any of it, and kept shooting the poor kid really filthy glances. It was only the worry about whether we'd leave Tray behind in one of the cells and Eric's constant monitoring of him that kept Eric from going over there and dragging Amelia away.

"I don't think Longshadow's even his real name" Felicia continued. "And the dad's Hot Rain. Who the hell is called Hot Rain?"

"Well, he is. I guess" I said, as I watched Eric shoot them all another deathly glance and completely ignore the fact that Sam was trying to entice Tray to follow him along some path that led God knows where around the base of the island.

The rest of San Francisco was nice too. We ate at In N Out burger for lunch, which fascinated the kids with its limited menu. "Is that all there is?" Sam asked Eric.

"Yep" Eric said. "There is nothing with pesto, mango chutney, chilli jam or fucking beetroot."

"Weird" Sam commented.

"Really fucking not" Eric assured him, before he went to order.

We walked all around, rode on one of the trolley car things, looked at the impossibly steep streets and ate dim sum in a Chinese restaurant where Eric tried valiantly to pretend he knew what we were eating, when he quite clearly didn't.

The waitresses were great with the kids, and fawned over Pam especially, but even that didn't bring her out of the funk she'd been in all day. San Francisco might have been fun for the rest of us, but to Pam it was just one precious day away from Miriam, a day she'd never get back.

The drive back was very quiet, as almost everyone fell asleep at one point or another. Even I dozed slightly, grateful not to be driving. I wished Eric would say something, anything, to acknowledge Pam and Pam's difficulties but he didn't.

And then we were another day down. And it was night of Pam's big sleep-over. She was beyond excited about it. "Miriam's mommy is going to let us stay up late" she announced. "And eat popcorn and watch more episodes of Xena on her laptop, which is going to be super-fun!" I wasn't sure if it was just me or if she was going native and getting the accent.

"Uh-huh" I said. "Well that does sound cool."

"So cool!" Pam exclaimed, as she grabbed Mr Fluffy off the bed, hesitated, and then put him back down again.

"Mr Fluffy doesn't do sleep-overs?" I asked.

"Well, I don't know" Pam said, looking at me seriously. "What do you think?"

"Um…it's up to you. I mean, you might be lonely without him…in the night…in a strange place…" I remembered my first time sleeping at Tara's house and waking in the night feeling a bit out of sorts. It was hard being homesick.

"Oh, well. It's not a strange place at all" Pam assured me. "I love it there. It's so much fun!" She looked at me and smiled, and then that smile faded rapidly and my heart broke for her. I wanted to hug her, but it was Pam, and you couldn't just assume that was what she wanted.

And in this case, she didn't. She plastered that smile back on her face and she marched next door while I wondered how I got such brave daughters.

**A/N The Treaty of Waitangi is the document signed in 1840 by representatives of the English crown and various Maori iwi (tribes) which forms the basis of the decisions made by the Waitangi Tribunal about settlements on things like land, fishing rights etc.**

**Golden syrup is thick like a kind of treacle and really, really sweet.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	44. Chapter 44

**A/N So my cat has been on the equivalent of Jenny Craig for cats for over a year now. He's pretty much reached a plateau though. This could be why.  
>Things my cat has stolen and managed to eat in the last few days -<br>****Dropped popcorn  
><strong>**Chicken kiev (well, OK, I may have given that to him, but under severe duress and the stares from big, sad kitten-eyes)  
><strong>**Easter egg (reported by a child, but not verified)  
>The ice cream dregs left over inside the plastic container (there was a lot of whisker-licking after that treat)<br>Something unidentified from under the coffee table  
>Crumbs from the pastry around the sausage roll my daughter had for lunch and left on her sticker book<strong>

**Things my cat has stolen and not managed to eat -  
><strong>**A plastic hair-tie (too chewy)  
>A skink (at least, I think so. I found him outside with our other cat who, in the manner of older siblings everywhere, seemed to have taken over searching all the cracks between the paving stones for his lost treasure while he sat there and watched her. I swear I could hear her tutting at him)<br>Easter egg wrapper (not as good as the contents)  
>Playdough (but only because I was quick enough to get it back off him)<br>The button on my pants (it's attached, for a start)  
>The laptop mouse (he's still hopeful)<strong>

**So he's doing well on his diet, I think :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine**

SPOV

Now that Pam had gone next door I was at a bit of a loose end, with nothing much left to do but worry. And that's never productive. I wondered what I could do; the washing was up to date, bar packing it all, Eric was taking us to dinner as we were on really short rations now. And it wasn't worth me cleaning anything as I'd just be taking all that fun away from Luna.

I thought I'd see what everyone else was up to. Felicia was annoying Amelia. "So, has he like said anything?" she was saying when I walked into the living room and found Felicia trying to read something on Amelia's laptop over Amelia's shoulder.

"Butt out, Leesh" Amelia warned.

"What's happening?" I asked, and they froze, and then did a weird kind of silent communication where they looked at each other for a few seconds and it was pretty clear that they were trying to work out whether or not I was cool enough to be allowed in on the story. Huh. I wasn't even one of the cool girls to my own daughters.

Felicia shrugged. "Just looking at Amelia's Facebook page" she said.

"Shut up!" Amelia warned.

"She's put the San Francisco trip photos up" Felicia said, smirking. "Now she's waiting to see what Riley says. About, you know her sudden interest in Native Americans, and their land rights."

Amelia looked embarrassed. "Just shut up already" she muttered. Hmm. She might not have been above trying to make Riley a little jealous, but she didn't want me to know about it. I just hoped it didn't backfire on her, sometimes those things did.

"Well, OK" I said, as they both ignored me, Amelia trying to hide the screen and Felicia saying "Has he seen it yet? What's the time at home anyway?", as she attempted to wrench it out of Amelia's grasp.

I carried on and found Sam, Tray and Immanuel sitting on the floor of the boys' room, with the Monopoly board between them. Although, it was a slightly doctored board I found myself looking at. "Why are there pictures of flames taped on some of the squares?" I asked.

Sam pointed to a pile of small pieces of paper which also had flames drawn on them. "You get a fire card if you land on one" he explained.

"And then you can burn down someone's hotel" Tray added. Immanuel nodded, like this was the normal way you played Monopoly.

"Have you guys been playing with Dad again?" I asked. Sam looked at me sharply. "Don't tell him we're playing" he hissed. Yeah, Eric's desire to win was a bit notorious. He was not a happy camper if it looked as though one of the kids might beat him, and he certainly wasn't prepared to cut them any slack like I did when I played. If they made stink choices, then that was their own faults and they would learn from the experience.

"OK" I agreed. "And the little tanks lined up on the edge of the board are for…?"

"Hostile takeovers" Sam informed me, only managing to sound a tiny bit like he thought I was slow on the uptake.

"Oh" I said, wondering how this game got so complicated.

Sam, I think, mistook my confusion for me feeling left out. "You could play with us, but we've been going a while now…" he said. Well, maybe I did want to join in just a bit. But at any rate, I didn't want to play their slightly confusing and aggressive version of Monopoly.

"You could maybe play the next game" Tray said. "We might try, uh…Battleship?" he looked to Sam for confirmation.

"Yeah, when Immanuel has to go home" Sam said, and Immanuel just shrugged. Unlike Pam he didn't seem to be bothered about when or if he had to go back to his own house.

"But no do-overs" Tray said, as he threw the dice and then moved his piece on the Monopoly board. "Dad says that's not a real rule and Mum just made it up so she can win."

"Actually, Uncle Jason made it up" I pointed out. "And Dad doesn't know everything about Battleship, you know. I'm quite good at it, even without the do-overs."

Tray gave me a sceptical look. Sam had moved on, and was now pointing at Tray's piece on the board. "You owe Immanuel…a hundred bucks…plus another 10 per cent to me…so that's a hundred and ten all up" he said to Tray.

"What for?" Tray asked, looking down at the space he'd landed on, and then back up at Sam.

"Foreign investment tax. We're playing with the American version, remember?" Sam said.

"Again?" Tray asked. "Fuck, that's killing me. I don't see why being American is so bloody great anyway." Tray looked at Immanuel, who stopped grinning, and tried to look sheepish, and then he paused for a moment, before looking over at Sam. "Why am I paying you?"

"I brokered the deal. Immanuel, your turn."

OK, well I thought I would just leave them all to it at that point. Eric had obviously been over-complicating this game for a while now, and I suspected you now needed American citizenship to win. Do-overs in Battleship were nothing compared to all the stuff that had been added in to Monopoly when I wasn't playing.

I drifted down the hall and wondered about cleaning the bathrooms, but decided against it. I'd give them a good scrub on the day we actually left so Luna wouldn't be totally freaked out when she moved in. God knows, I didn't want her turning up on my doorstep in Auckland and complaining to me, and I didn't put it past her to track me down. So I went in search of someone else to hang out with.

But Eric was a bit tricky to find.

I thought he'd be hanging around with the coffeemaker, but he wasn't in the kitchen. Or the living room, which was still occupied by Amelia, Felicia, a lap top and a frosty silence, and he wasn't out the front throwing things into the bin. Now that the novelty of points had worn off, Eric was stuck doing it himself if he wanted anything else added to the pile of discards.

Eventually I tracked him down to the now almost-empty bedroom. He was sitting at the small desk in the corner, at a weird sideways angle because he couldn't fit his legs underneath the desk itself, coffee cup in his hand and just staring at a plain blue screen on the monitor.

Well, that looked boring. I nearly broke ranks and told him to go and join the boys for Monopoly, but they wouldn't thank me. So I pressed on. "So, uh, what's happening?" I asked.

Eric shrugged and kept looking at the screen. I sat on the bed and waited for a bit. Eventually he said "I figured I should try to clear the hard drive off before we donated it, but I couldn't get in before. Didn't have the password." There was another pause, while Eric sipped his coffee and pulled a face. I wasn't sure if it was because it was cold, or because we were getting down to the last of the supplies and this was one of the experimental coffees we'd bought early on which hadn't really passed muster. But Eric didn't elaborate on that either.

I waited a bit longer while Eric looked at the screen some more.

"It's Pamela" he said in the end, and I almost looked out the window to see if he'd seen her doing something, and then I remember that there was another one, floating around somewhere out there, one who had the name first. Oh. So Stan had used his ex's name as his password. That was both weird and kind of sad, I thought.

Eric didn't comment.

"So…did you figure it out because your password is Sookie?" I asked, and Eric finally turned to look at me. Yeah, see that was the same look Sam and Tray were giving me about the Monopoly rules when they thought I was a bit daft.

"No" Eric said. "That would be far too easy to guess." I didn't point out that internet safety was a moot point when you printed out most of your emails and left them sitting in a pile next to the laptop.

"Guess your dad figured no one else would know about her" I said, as Eric turned back to the monitor and switched it off. He shrugged again. "So what's everyone else doing?" he asked.

"Um…the boys are…" I stopped myself from saying it just in time, "…um, playing. With Immanuel."

"As long as no one is getting a fucking hair-cut, that's OK" Eric said.

"Yeah. Shame Ivan wasn't here though, he could do with a trim. Amelia and Felicia are annoying each other. Well, Amelia seems to be trying to make Riley jealous with pictures of her and that Longshadow guy she's put on Facebook."

"I don't like him" Eric mused.

"What? Riley?"

"No. The other one. With the hair." Jeez, Eric couldn't even bring himself to say the poor kid's name.

"Right. Well I don't think we'll ever see him again, so I wouldn't worry. I'm more concerned with Amelia stuffing things up with Riley." Eric didn't reply, so I carried on. "And of course Pam is next door."

"Of course she fucking is" Eric mumbled, and he glared at the house next door out the window in the same way he glared at poor Longshadow when he was around. But it didn't make Longshadow burst into flames and it probably wouldn't do the same thing for that house, which was a good thing, given one of our children was currently in there.

"She needs to make the most of it" I pointed out. "While she can still go over there, because…" I gave up. Eric knew too. He just obviously didn't understand it.

"So, they renovated that place?" Eric asked suddenly, which seemed a bit out of the blue.

"Yeah, Rachel said they'd spent a while getting it right. I think she'd had problems with the people they got to do it. It's nice though. They've knocked through to the kitchen and have this one big space, rather than a stupid dining nook like this place has. I bet Luna's over there within two hours of moving in, she'll be dying to see what can be done." I laughed a bit, Eric almost smiled.

"It was always bigger. That house. And it never had a dining nook" Eric mused. I contemplated that statement for a bit and realised Eric had never spoken about the old neighbours. I wondered if I should ask. Well, I was bored, and I was nosey.

"Who used to live there?" I asked.

"Um…last people I remember…just a family" Eric said, sounding fairly neutral about it all. "Parents and a couple of girls."

"I bet they loved you" I said, and I think Eric misinterpreted that statement. "Yeah, they fucking didn't" he said. "The dad used to give me fucking evil looks over the fence all the time and I don't think I ever really spoke to either of his daughters. He was just mean for no fucking reason." Uh-huh. Really. I resisted the urge to point at Eric and yell 'pot!'

"So…you never went over there?" I asked, trying to work out how he knew the layout of the house.

"Oh…I used to go over before that" Eric said, this time sounding off-hand. Almost like he was trying to be deliberately off-hand. Hmm.

"Who was there?" I asked, trying to be almost as off-hand. This conversation was a bit like getting blood out of a stone.

"Oh. Um. Another family" Eric said, which didn't really tell me much. He thought for a moment. "They were nice" he added. "They had, um…I think it was five kids. Maybe six in the end. I remember a baby being born…not much about the actual baby though. One of the sons was in my class."

"So…you were over there a lot?"

"Yeah. I guess. I mean…they were close. And the mom was nice. She used to let me stay for dinner sometimes. Said that she had so many kids she didn't notice another one. That…well. It was helpful." I could imagine that she probably wouldn't feel right sending Eric back to goodness knows what over here. I got the impression Supermarket Surprise dinners weren't so much of a surprise and more like normal menu items after his mother left. "I liked it over there" Eric added, and I nearly asked him why in the hell he was denying Pam the opportunity to have a nice time with the neighbours too.

Then I thought of something.

"What happened?" I asked. "To that family?"

Eric sighed. "They moved" he said. "The dad got a job down in San Luis Obispo and they left. I didn't really know until the moving van showed up one day. It was, uh…surprising."

And there it was. Eric was enough a part of the family to have dinner with them on a regular basis, but not part of the family when it came to actually getting away from here. No wonder he was a bit bitter about it all.

And kind of biased when it came to Pam hanging out over there. As sad as the story was though, there wasn't much I could for Eric now. Not that took away the kinds of hurt that had happened to him when he was a kid, anyway.

"Pam likes it there" I said.

"Yeah" Eric agreed.

"It's nice she has a friend" I said.

"Yeah" Eric said again. I waited, but that seemed to be the extent of his input. I hoped he got it.

"So where are you taking us for dinner?" I asked.

"Oh" Eric said, at the sudden change of subject. "Italian, OK?"

"Perfect" I said, and I stood up and went over to where Eric was sitting and put my arms around his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. That was nice. Although he still looked really cramped sitting at that desk.

"I'm hungry" Tray announced, as he walked into the room.

"That's nice" I said to him.

"There's dinner…soon?" he asked.

"No one's forgotten to feed you yet, Tray" Eric said to him.

Sam came in as well. "Did Immanuel go home?" I asked him.

"Yeah. He said they were having a special dinner in honour of Pam. I don't know why. I mean, it's Pam. She's not special. She's kind of a pain in the bum."

"What're they having?" Tray asked.

"I dunno" Sam said. "Food. Maybe food Pam likes?" He shrugged.

"Pam likes…Pam likes lamb chops. Maybe it's that?" Tray mused.

"You weren't invited, so it doesn't matter" I pointed out to Tray, in case he got any ideas about wandering over there and inviting himself.

"Miriam's nicer than Pam, but Immanuel doesn't think she is" Sam said, still stuck further back in the conversation. Tray looked at him. "You _like_ Miriam?" he asked, and Sam looked panicked. "Not really" he said. "But she's better than Pam."

"But they're both girls" Tray pointed out. "So they're kind of stink."

"I don't know that you should say that in front of mom" Eric suggested, and Tray looked taken aback. "She's not a girl. She's just mum" he said.

"And she's not stink" Eric added. Tray shrugged. Sam looked like he had recovered his composure. He nodded. I liked to think he was agreeing more with Eric than with Tray's 'just mum' comment.

"So, who won?" I asked them.

"Won what?" Eric asked. Sam frowned at me, but honestly, the game was over. What was Eric going to do now?

Well, maybe point out where they'd gone wrong but the trick was not to give him too much information. I hope Sam and Tray had figured that one out.

"Um…Monopoly" Sam said. "It looked like Immanuel was going to win. He had a lot of money."

""cos he's American" Tray said.

"Yeah" Sam agreed. "Having to pay for that foreign investment thing kind of sucked."

"So did he win?" I asked.

"Nah" Tray said. "Sam did." Sam looked a bit self-conscious, like he was proud of his success, but not really wanting to bask in the glory.

"How?" Eric asked sharply, which really did suggest that most of these new rules had been set up purely to help Eric beat his sons.

"Oh, um…well. We used the Resource Management Act" Sam said.

"You did?" Eric asked.

"Yeah" Tray confirmed. "I'm the, uh…what am I?"

"Local iwi, Tray" Sam prompted.

"Yeah. That. So I would give it. To Immanuel."

"Resource consent" Sam clarified. "You wouldn't give him resource consent, so he couldn't build anything."

"Yeah" Tray said. "That's 'cos I'm Maori, eh?" He looked at Sam for confirmation. Sam rolled his eyes. "No, you've just got a Maori middle name, dumb-ass."

Tray frowned. "Really?" he asked, looking at me and Eric.

"Mmm-hmm" I said nodding, and trying not to laugh. "We're not Maori, so you're not."

"Oh" Tray said. He looked really disappointed. Poor kid. I guess that had made him a little bit special for a while, being the only Maori person in the immediate family. Still, he recovered pretty quickly. "So…dinner is happening?" he asked.

"Yes" Eric said. "Dinner is definitely happening. Go and put some shoes on." And just like that Eric had recovered as well.

I only hoped Pam had such great powers of recovery from her disappointments.

EPOV

I was ready for this all to be fucking over. All the strange discoveries, the dragging up of old memories, the reminders around every fucking corner of how it all used to be. Because that part of my life was fucking over, it really was. And I had the family to prove it.

Well, most of them anyway. Pam was still not fucking talking to me, and had now officially moved next door. I wasn't sure we were ever going to get her back, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be there to pick up the pieces if she did come back. Because I'd fucking told her it wasn't going to be all roses and sunshine, and that you couldn't just push yourself into other people's families no matter how fucking nice it seemed over there. She belonged with us, but she just didn't seem to believe that now.

Just like Tray didn't want to believe he wasn't really Maori.

So Pam stayed where she was and the rest of us went to some cheap Italian place for dinner. It wasn't anything special, well, not to anyone who wasn't Tray. "Look, Mum" he'd pointed out. "See their spaghetti bolognaise doesn't have all those bits of vegetables in them."

"Yeah" Sookie said, drily. "Fancy that." Poor Tray, he'd tried the same trick when we'd eaten Indian food as well. He hadn't yet figured out that Sookie added vegetables to pretty much everything on purpose, not just because she was a bit ambivalent about the recipes. I liked her cooking though. It was better than the shit at this restaurant, anyway.

It would be fucking good to get home.

"So when we get home, what do you think Riley will say?" Felicia asked Amelia. "Do you think he will have _missed_ you? Because he _loves_ you?" She gave Amelia a great big cheesy smile.

"Shut up" Amelia said, poking at her risotto.

"Oh, but he will have missed you soooo much" Felicia said, purposely not looking in my direction. If she had, she might have noticed the look I was giving her, which was meant to convey the sentiment 'knock it off'. Amelia was twisting her necklace, some weird girl with a bundle thing which we'd bought her for her birthday, in the same way Sookie played with her necklace when she got a bit flustered.

Felicia might have been enjoying this, but Amelia wasn't at all. "Just shut up" Amelia muttered.

"There's not even courgette or that zucchini stuff in here, Mum!" Tray exclaimed.

"Hey, did you eat the last piece of garlic bread, Tray?" Sam asked, peering around the table.

"You can have mine" Sookie said, handing it over, and I shifted my glance to her. Really, if Sam wasn't quick enough to get his own garlic bread, then that was kind of his problem.

When I looked back to Amelia, it was a lot worse. Her lip was wobbling. Fuck. Why did this always have to happen at fucking dinner?

Felicia had finally noticed too, and had turned back to her dinner, but it was too fucking late for that. Amelia put her hands over her face and stood up and bolted in the direction of the bathrooms. Which I was kind of glad of, because that made her Sookie's problem without any discussion over the matter. Thank fuck for that. I didn't want to talk her down off the ledge over…fuck. I had no clue exactly. The fact Riley wasn't jealous of the kid with the hair? Yeah, that shit never did work.

Sookie stood up and followed Amelia, and Tray glanced at Sookie's plate. "Mum left her chicken" he said.

"It's not up for distribution" I told him.

"I was just _saying_!" he said. And that was another thing I had to do. Talk to Tray about all the shit he wanted to bring home. He seemed to think that if you grabbed it quickly enough and stuck it in a box, it was yours forever. And I was fucked if I was paying to ship an entire socket set home with us.

Felicia wasn't saying anything. And she wasn't making eye contact with anyone now either. Yeah, she was fucking old enough to realise what she'd done, and it wasn't a particularly nice thing at all.

Eventually she looked up at me. "What?" she asked, with all the fucking bravado in the world, but I could see she was a bit flustered; she just didn't have a necklace to twist.

"Mum's dinner came with potatoes" Tray announced.

"Which she will eat when she gets back" I said to him, before looking back at Felicia. "You know what" I said to her.

Felicia shrugged. "Not my fault he hasn't replied to her messages."

"I don't think she'll want cold potatoes" Tray mused.

"Yes, Tray. She will" I assured him.

"She didn't want the bread she gave Sam."

"You ate all the bread, you dick" Sam told him. Tray didn't look at all guilty about that.

"OK everyone, eat your fucking dinners and stop worrying about what everyone else is eating."

"Not everyone" Tray corrected. "Just Mum. I don't care what Amelia had. It looks like shit."

Felicia just kept her eyes on her own plate. It was nice that one of them fucking was.

SPOV

This was the point where I felt totally out of my depth. How the hell did I end up in the toilets in a small Italian restaurant giving relationship advice to my daughter?

"Um…it's probably the time difference" I said.

Amelia sniffed. Loudly. And then she blew her nose on some toilet paper and it was even louder. "That's never been a thing before. I mean, he keeps his phone…by his pillow…so he'll know. He just doesn't care." She tried to pretend she didn't care either, but she clearly did.

"It's difficult when you're not face to face" I said to her. "Just let things die down a bit, and then…see what's happening when you get home. It's only a couple more days."

"I guess" Amelia said, fiddling with the expensive Karen Walker pendant she'd made us buy her for her birthday. And then of course she'd wished she'd asked for hair straighteners instead. And it seemed to have set a precedent, Felicia was determined she was getting the skull pendant for her 14th birthday, or maybe her 13th, or even her 12th if she nagged us enough. She was nothing if not optimistic about winning Eric over.

"So let's go out and enjoy our dinners. Or see if we still have any" I said to her, as I led the way out of the Ladies.

"He will…I mean, he won't break up with me, will he Mum?" Amelia said pleadingly. I didn't have an answer to that one. I wished she'd asked me something simple, like 'can I have your potato?'

"I don't know, sweetheart. I'm sure…well. When you talk to him you'll be able to figure it out. It might be a simple explanation. Distance always makes it harder." I remembered what it was like when Eric had called me from the States, the first time he'd gone back, and he'd been drunk and miserable and talking about not wanting to come back. Yeah, distance was not always kind to relationships.

Bits of this trip might have sucked, but I was glad I'd come over.

We walked back to the table and Eric raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded, and then tried to pretend I wasn't missing some potatoes. Felicia glanced at Amelia, but didn't say anything, and Amelia just held her head high and pretended that nothing untoward had happened.

The boys were kicking each other under the table, but that was normal. I gave them both one of my potatoes, under Eric's glare, and it died down for a bit.

EPOV

Amelia looked miserable, but there wasn't much we could do about it. If she'd made Riley that pissed at her, then it was kind of her own fault for playing stupid games in the first place. That shit never worked, and I lost count of the times girls had tried it when I was at school. And some of them seemed to never fucking grow out of it.

I hoped Amelia had learned her lesson though.

We finished the meal and I paid, thankful that the expenditure of this fucking trip was coming to an end. Sure, we'd get the money from Dad's house eventually, but it was still fucking expensive with seven people and an exchange rate that didn't favour the New Zealand dollar.

As we left the restaurant Tray and Sam got into a scuffle on the sidewalk over fuck knows what. The fact they'd been sitting down for an hour and a half mostly, I think, and now they just had to get it out of their system. It wouldn't have been so bad, except that they nearly took out some woman walking past on the street.

"Sorry" Sookie said to her, while trying to get the boys' attention.

The woman looked at Sookie briefly, and then she looked at me. "Eric?" she asked. Yeah, fuck.

SPOV

Typically there'd been fighting over dinner, followed by fighting after dinner and that was with us being a kid down. I bet there wasn't any fighting at Miriam's house. I should have gone there. And then Tray and Sam nearly knocked over some poor woman on the footpath.

A woman who knew Eric. Huh. Weird. I turned to look at her and really wished I hadn't. Boy, she was pretty. Really pretty. She had glossy, highlighted hair and hazel eyes and she was tall and slim and wearing really nice black slacks with a cream shirt. I wished I'd dressed that nicely. And what really topped it all off was the fact she seemed to have kids with her too, two little boys in matching shirts and shorts who weren't fighting. In fact they were staring at Tray and Sam with a mixture of horror and admiration.

Crap, I thought. This is it. This is where Eric finally figures out the life he could have had if he hadn't moved to New Zealand and taken up with me. He could have had her, and her matching sons who didn't fight and swear. I pretended I couldn't hear Tray shout "Fuck off!" to Sam. I hoped everyone else did too.

There was another woman with the party. She was smaller, and darker and maybe younger, but just as pretty. Double crap. This woman even had a gorgeous nanny. More to the point she had a nanny.

Life just sucked sometimes.

"I thought it was you" the woman said to Eric, and then she stepped over and kissed him on the cheek. I thought that was a bit presumptuous. Eric though didn't fight her off, mainly because he had that look on his face he got when he was trying to pretend he knew what the hell was going on. He'd had the same look at the Chinese restaurant we'd gone to in San Francisco when he had no clue if we were being served chicken feet or pig's trotters but he wanted to pretend like he did.

"Um, yes" Eric said. "Hello."

The woman smiled. "Hannah" she said. "Hannah Lawson. From school. Remember?"

"Yes" Eric lied. Well, actually, no. He didn't. He did remember her; I could see the relief on his face.

Yep, this was where it all went to custard. Poo, shit, bugger and bollocks.

"Bugger off!" Sam yelled at Tray. I wondered if I could get him to yell it to the woman too.

"I haven't seen you in years!" Hannah said, beaming at Eric.

"I moved. To New Zealand" Eric explained.

"Oh. I've always wanted to go there" she said. "It looked lovely in those Lord of the Rings movies, and I've heard it's beautiful and untouched." Yep, of course she'd be the one person here who didn't think we lived in Australia.

"It's very nice" Eric agreed.

"And you have a family?" she prompted, which made Eric finally introduce us all; although why he owned up to us I don't know. Between Sam and Tray's fighting, the fact that Amelia was still holding back tears and Felicia was sulking in a funk because she knew she'd upset Amelia, we weren't exactly the most perfect nuclear family out there.

Hannah turned to me. "It's nice to meet you, Sookie" she said. "Eric and I go a long way back. We used to date. Well, sort of date." She laughed at that. I wasn't sure it was that funny.

Hannah's kids just stood and stared at us all, flanking their nanny. Maybe they liked her better, I thought. After all, if you're still dragging the nanny out with you to dinner, how involved can you be as a parent?

Jeez, I didn't like the jealous part of my brain at all.

I almost missed the next part of the conversation but managed to tune in to get the salient points. "And this is my wife, Liza" Hannah said, gesturing to the nanny who wasn't a nanny. Oh.

Well that was…interesting. To me anyway. Eric looked less than interested. Eric looked a bit like he wanted to do a Tray and bolt. Actually, was Tray still here?

I checked on Tray and hauled him back from a shop he'd nearly wandered into and missed the two boys being introduced. They didn't say much. Just stared at Eric. Felicia and Amelia seemed to have made up and were whispering to each other, kind of rudely.

"Well, nice to see you again" Eric said, after a few more moments of awkward chatting. "And, um, you too…" he nodded at Liza who didn't seem to warrant a name in Eric's world.

Tray piped up. "So if girls can get married to each other that's a bit weird, isn't it? Isn't it?" I tried to ignore him. "Isn't it, Mum?" he said, really loudly. Hannah had the grace to smile at least.

"No. It's normal" I told Tray. "If they want to."

Tray shrugged. "We should tell Pam, she thinks boys suck."

"She thinks you suck. Because you do" Sam informed him.

"You both suck. Not because you're boys, but because you're morons" Felicia said.

"You all suck. You're such babies!" Amelia yelled at them. And that was pretty much our cue to leave.

Eric was quiet on the way home, but the kids weren't. There was a lot of fighting and yelling, and then Amelia's phone beeped and she shrieked and wouldn't look, and Felicia told her she was an idiot and she told Felicia she didn't know what it was like, and Felicia pointed out that no, she didn't know what it was like to be an idiot and then they argued a bit more, and there was a tussle over the phone which Tray tried to join in, but both his big sisters gave him short shrift and thumped him rather soundly.

When we got back to the house Amelia disappeared off pretty quickly to, I assumed, check her message, and I tried to get everyone else to take showers and get into bed. Some with more success than others. In the end I had to get Eric to lay down the law to Tray about the fact that even with shorter hair, it still had to be washed. Occasionally at least.

And when they were all in bed I went to check on Amelia. "So…?" I asked, and she looked at me like I was just being nosy.

"So, what?" she asked.

"The message. Was it what you hoped?"

"Oh. Yeah" she said airily. "Apparently Riley ran out of money on his phone and couldn't get any more until he did some stuff around the house. His dad is like, _really_ tough on him, and just, like, makes stuff difficult. For no reason." She smiled a bit to herself, probably drifting off into some nice little Romeo and Juliet fantasy.

Well, fine. As long as she was happy, I was leaving her to it.

Eric didn't look that happy though, when I went into our room. Well, he kept looking at me like he was waiting for me to say something. I held off though.

Maybe I was enjoying this a bit. It certainly beat feeling jealous.

I sat on the bed and flicked through a book for a bit while Eric fluffed around packing up the rest of Stan's computer into a box. "Did you tell Tray?" I asked in the end.

"Tell Tray what?" Eric asked, but he was sort of muffled as he was under the desk unplugging stuff. See, any other time he would have asked me to do that, and then he would have stood behind me making loud remarks about what a good view it was staring at my bottom, and what fond memories it brought back, but tonight he didn't. No, tonight he was trying to avoid all mention of sex in case I brought up Hannah.

"That he can't take all that stuff home? You said something about there being a socket set?"

Eric popped up over the end of the bed, and looked kind of relieved. "Yeah" he said. "We had a chat."

"And there's still a socket set going home?" I prompted. Eric shrugged. "He worked really hard on getting all the boxes taped up neatly. You know, I might let him do this one in the morning too" he said, throwing some cables in with the monitor.

"Yeah, that'd be the nice thing to do" I said, and Eric missed the sarcasm. "He has been pretty good while we've been here" Eric said. "And he spent a long time sorting through the stuff in the garage with me."

"So basically, if you're good at finding stuff you want to keep, you can keep it? That's the new rule?"

"Yeah. I guess." Eric said, and then he stood up. "Hannah seemed nice…" I said, but Eric managed to step into the ensuite at the mention of her name and close the door on me.

Well poo to him too.

When he came back out I went in, and when I was done Eric was in bed watching TV and scrolling through his phone at the same time. "Her kids were very well-behaved" I said. I had to talk quite loudly, as the volume on the TV was up quite a way.

Eric looked at me, and sighed in a very exasperated way, and then he turned the TV off and put his phone down and looked at me. "Fine" he said. "Just say it. Get it all off your chest, Sookie. Honestly, it's like watching Felicia when she's desperate to tease Amelia."

I sat on the bed next to him and ignored that comment. "What on earth did you do to her?" I asked.

"What?" Eric asked.

"Well…Eric, she dated you. And now she's gay."

"I'm pretty sure she was always gay Sookie" Eric grumped.

"Really? Tell her your hot-tub lesbian fantasies, did you?"

Eric huffed some more but didn't say anything. "I'm sure she really liked you" I said. "Just clearly, not like that."

"Fuck off" Eric said, but he was at least smiling. "I always knew."

"Did you?"

"No" Eric confessed. "I thought…well, I heard some shit about how she'd hooked up with other cheerleaders and I thought it was just a story. To make me jealous."

"And were you?" I asked him.

Eric shrugged. "Not really. She wasn't anything that special. And I hate that kind of shit…all that game playing. Girls that age are really fucking annoying."

"Maybe you should have been saying that to Amelia" I said, thinking out loud. "Maybe not" I decided, thinking it wouldn't go down well. About as well as telling Pam not to go next door had gone. Sometimes they had to live through those things themselves, rather than have the Eric Northman lecture on why you should learn from his life. We just had to trust they'd learn from it.

Although I'm not sure Tray was ever going to learn not to wander off.

"I never did any of that" I said, looking at Eric. Mainly because I didn't date anyone in high school. Well, that friend of JB's once, which kind of sucked because really, I had a bit of a crush on JB himself and I was jealous of Tara that he picked her. God, that seemed a long time ago now. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like if I'd actually ended up with him. Not well, would be the short answer.

"No" Eric said. "Well, you wouldn't." It was nice he had faith in me.

"Plus, I'm not a lesbian" I added. "Despite the fact that Tara keeps telling me we'd be better off without men. But I don't want to leave you for Tara. She gets cranky when she has PMT. Much worse than when you just haven't had coffee."

"Gosh, thanks for picking me based on my level of fucking grumpiness" Eric said, grumpily.

"There are other reasons I like you" I said, putting my hand on Eric's chest. I loved his chest. I loved all of him of course, but his chest was really nice.

I could appreciate other women for being beautiful. God knows, that Hannah had been stunning. But I couldn't conjure up the desire to have sex with any of them. It would just be…well, a bit odd. Having sex with someone who was basically built like you.

Eric's bare chest was far more interesting than another set of boobs. That I could attest to.

"Really?" Eric asked.

"Uh-huh" I said, concentrating on the patterns I was drawing on Eric. I moved over so I was straddling his waist, and then I bent down and kissed him. He sat further up in the bed and buried his hands in my hair, and I ran mine across his shoulders and down his back. His back was pretty good too. All of him was nice, there was muscle and he was warm and firm and I liked it when he held me and he made me feel safe.

Eric might have been a little bit more on the side of boobs, given he was trying to get my tank top off me, but that was alright with me.

"So you're not scared I'm going to turn you gay?" Eric murmured as he kissed my neck and across my collarbone.

"No" I said. "No, I think if it was going to happen it would have by now."

"Good" Eric said, taking a nipple into his mouth. Yeah, it was nice that he liked doing that.

After he'd been enjoying my boobs for a while I pushed his shoulder. "Lie down" I said. "My turn."

Eric didn't really question that one. Sometimes he can be amazingly compliant. It only seems to work with me though, in the same way Ivan only heels for Eric. Luckily for Eric, I only use my powers for good.

He lay back and I repaid his nipples in kind. And I kissed his chest, and down his stomach and stroked his sides. He was really so nice to touch. I was more than a little turned on.

I pushed his underwear down and ran my hands down his thighs while I was at it. They were nice too. I ran my nails up them lightly a few times. I kind of liked that they were hairy. I have no idea why, I guess I was just wired that way.

And not the way Hannah was, anyway.

It was always lots of fun to touch Eric's penis too. I still loved that tiny bit of power I felt when I took him in my mouth, the excitement of that never got old. It was exhilarating and very, very erotic.

And when he was close I stopped sucking and moved back up his body, sliding my breasts along his stomach and chest as I did so, before kissing Eric's mouth again. Yeah, Eric or no Eric, why you'd want to trade all this in for sex with women I couldn't fathom.

Luckily, I didn't have to.

Particularly because at that moment Eric rolled us over and pulled off my pyjama shorts before he put a hand between my legs and slipped a finger into me. "You're wet" he murmured.

"Mmm-hmm" I agreed. Definitely more than a little turned on.

"Remember to be quiet" Eric said, as he positioned himself between my legs.

"Worry-wort" I whispered back. The boys slept like the dead most nights.

Eric pushed in and I held him close with my legs. This was the good bit. I really liked this bit.

What the hell did you do without this bit?

But my mind pretty soon cleared of wondering about stuff like that. Eric started moving and with an orgasm fast approaching I wasn't thinking about much except how much I really, really, really liked Eric and what we were doing right then, and maybe just a tiny bit about that time he'd made me touch myself while he watched, or the time we'd had sex in front of the mirror at the old house, or the last time we'd had sex in the old nursing chair in our bedroom.

And then I came. And, after a while, I came again. And Eric followed me, trying to muffle his groan of "Fuck" in the pillow and my hair.

Yeah, that was really great.

"I love you" I whispered to Eric, and I kissed the smooth, warm skin where his shoulder met his chest.

"I love you too" he whispered back.

After some clean-up, we curled up in bed and I felt happy and relaxed. "You know" Eric said, quietly. "You were right."

"What about?" I asked.

"When you said you always run into the people you expect the least. I mean, fuck. Hannah? And her wife? That was just fucking odd."

"OK, well that was a few days ago that I said that, but points for paying attention" I said, reaching down and patting the hand he'd draped on my hip.

"How many points?" Eric asked, with a laugh.

"Oh you sound like Tray" I whispered back. "But fine, you can have a gazillion."

"Yay! I won" Eric said.

"Yeah, like you wouldn't anyway" I snorted. "I love the new Monopoly rules by the way, all that paying foreign investment tax to American citizens. Is that rule going to work in reverse when we get home and start playing with the old New Zealand board, or is the American version going home with us so you can always win?"

"Um…" Eric said thoughtfully. "Well, I suppose it could."

"Which one?"

"Um…come home with us…" Eric said. Yeah, he really wanted to make sure he won that game.

"They'll just pull out the Resource Management Act again" I pointed out. "And you know what you think about that." Eric was not a big believer in private investment being held up by what he termed 'minor interests'. It was always best not to be around Eric when he was watching the TV news if you weren't a fan of the way he expressed those opinions. He needed to come with his own strong language warnings sometimes.

"Well that's OK" Eric said. "Better they have to think out a strategy." I wasn't really sure that was the whole object of Monopoly, to win by the creation of new rules, but they enjoyed it so I'd leave them all to it.

We were silent for a bit, and my mind drifted over a whole bunch of stuff. "I'm still worried about Pam" I said.

"Yeah" Eric whispered. "Me too."

If nothing else, at least we were in this together.

**So the Resource Management Act is what determines the steps you have to go through for all sorts of types of development and legislates to make sure that things like customary use of land is taken into account. Sometimes it's given a hard time. Iwi is the word for Maori tribes.**

**And for those who need reminding, Tray's middle name is Te Kahurangi (Teh Car-hoo-rung-ee), which Eric let Crystal choose.**

**Amelia's necklace - www (dot) walkerandhall (dot) co (dot) nz /karen-walker/sterling-silver-karen-walker-runaway-girl-necklace/P24/C84 If you tootle around on the same site and look at the other Karen Walker designs you'll see the skull ones that Felicia likes. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	45. Chapter 45

**A/N It's quite late here, so I hope this makes sense! Also, while I was writing I lost part of the danish I was eating to my cat. I'm sad, he's not.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, I own a cat who, in the words of the vet nurse, is a bit unique, and possibly actually half-dog.**

EPOV

Sex with Sookie was always fucking good, but she was right. The whole situation with Pam was going to be a fucking disaster at any minute.

A part of me wanted to see if we could push our departure date out just so I didn't have to tell her that her playtime with her new friend was over, but that wouldn't work. The kids would miss school, Sookie would probably take up drinking gin full-time and we might have to live with that fucking annoying Luna person if I couldn't get out of the rental agreement.

So, fuck it. We had to go back to New Zealand.

Whether Pam liked it or not.

And she really wasn't going to like it. At all. She was fucking…entranced with what they had in that house over there, and I really fucking didn't know why. I mean, it wasn't like her life was that shitty, was it? Sure, it couldn't be that much fun being the youngest, but at least she was never lonely.

Did she want to be lonely?

No, that was Amelia, and her new damsel in a fucking tower act.

I didn't know what to do about Pam, and doing nothing had resulted in nothing more than the passage of time. I wasn't so sure that Sookie's 'go and have a pyjama party and live in the moment' method had worked out that well, but I figured we'd find that out when Pam came back.

If Pam came back.

Eventually Pam came back. It was after breakfast and she looked fucking grumpy. "How was it?" Sookie asked her, and Pam stared like Sookie was asking the most inane question she'd ever heard.

"It was Miriam's" she said, and then she disappeared down the hall with her bag.

I looked at Sookie, who was looking at me. Neither of us spoke for a moment. "She might get over it. By tomorrow" Sookie said.

I wasn't that fucking optimistic. I wondered what happened if your five year old refused to get on an aeroplane. At what point would the Air Marshals step in and just carry her onto the plane for us? And strap her down? Pam's tantrums were kind of legendary and although in recent years she'd pretty much stopped them, I worried that there might be a re-appearance for something this major.

And I'd almost rather face a tantrum than just total fucking silence.

Still, it was only Pam who was silent. No one else around here was ever fucking silent. Not even Amelia, who could only maintain her air of bored contempt for us all for about five minutes at a time. "So how much money are we spending?" Amelia asked Sookie, "And I get to pick, right? You're not picking, I'm picking?"

Sookie sighed. "We'll see" she said, giving the kitchen counter a wipe. I didn't know really why she was bothering, we were about to leave. If there was a layer of toast crumbs left behind, too bad.

"You never tell me ANYTHING!" Amelia yelled, and then she stomped off.

"So, uh…we do get to pick, don't we?" Felicia asked me, after she casually strolled over to where I was sitting. Yeah, Sookie had had the brilliant fucking idea that we'd go shopping to buy summer clothes for the kids. Because here it was summer, and the sales were on and she could get the jump on New Zealand by having bought a bunch of cheap clothing for the kids before the season had started, and the kids would be thrilled to pull out their new stuff come November and Sookie could concentrate on other stuff, like Christmas.

Well, that was Sookie's version of what was going to happen, anyway. My version was more along the lines of the hell that was going to be dragging five kids through a mall, trying to interest the boys in what we were doing when they didn't really want to be there, trying to explain to Amelia she couldn't have everything she wanted, trying to play 'guess what shoe size everyone will be in six months' time' with Sookie. It didn't sound like fun. At all.

Maybe Pam would think it was fun though? Maybe it would stop her wishing she was back in the house next door? Maybe she'd be thrilled about getting something that was all hers and she'd cheer the fuck up and forget Miriam?

Maybe I was optimistic.

"I'm not in charge of this outing" I told Felicia, and I went to break the bad news to the boys about the fact we were going shopping.

SPOV

I thought we could use up part of our last full day in the States by going shopping. It seemed like a good idea to me. It seemed like a really stink idea to Eric, who kept giving me the sad face every time it got mentioned. But I ignored him in the same way I ignored the boys who insisted they were far, far too busy to come with the rest of the family.

I was ignoring Pam's black mood too, but only because I didn't know what to do about it. I hoped the shopping would help, and the fact that I was letting her choose some clothes for herself while everyone else stood around and moaned and whinged or asked for money for ridiculous shoes, or tried to go and buy coffee while they thought I wasn't looking.

But even Pam's enthusiasm for new clothes was a bit lacklustre. "I don't know" she said shrugging. "I like the…purple one?"

"You want the purple t-shirt?" I asked her. "What about the blue one? Or this pink?"

Pam shrugged.

"Let's get them all, then" I said. "And go and look at skirts."

"Well, why is Pam getting so much?" Amelia asked. "I wasn't allowed everything I wanted."

"But you wanted ridiculous things, Ames" Felicia said, rolling her eyes. "Ri-fucking-diculous. You heard what Mum said."

"You're not the boss of me!" Amelia grumped. And Felicia just looked at her. Yeah, it was a pretty lame comeback, but their hearts didn't seem to be in the fighting at the moment. They both seemed a little bit worried about Pam.

Eric was mostly worried about when we were finishing and didn't appreciate having to hold Tray in one spot while I measured clothes against him and guestimated where he'd be in six months' time. I bought big in the end.

And then we had lunch and went back to the house, so Eric and Tray and Sam could pack up all the boxes and take them to the place that was going to ship them back to New Zealand for us. I had no idea what we were going to do with all that stuff when it arrived on the doorstep at home, and I wondered if I'd be lucky enough to have any of it lost in transit.

When they got back the boys were scratchy and spent a lot of time pushing each other, as Eric had also called in to see the lawyer, and check on his Dad's other car at the place where they were selling it on Eric's behalf, and basically do all those last minute things that had to be done. It had clearly been a day of too much standing around and waiting for Tray because he could not keep his hands to himself and in desperation Eric sent him and Sam outside to see how fast they could run laps around the house. Periodically they'd stick their heads in the door and ask Eric how fast that lap was, and Eric would look up from his phone and mumble something, and Tray and Sam would disappear again.

Pam was somewhere too, but she didn't want us to time her.

"Pam's a bit sad" Amelia announced, coming into the bedroom where I was trying hard to squeeze Eric's suitcase shut. The problem was the stupid ship in a bottle which he hadn't trusted to the freight company and which he'd insisted be wedged in the middle of his suitcase so it would be 'safe'. Yeah, terrific. The sooner we got that home and installed in Eric's office, far out of sight, the better.

"She is" I agreed, wondering if I took the ship in a bottle out and 'accidentally' left it on the floor, whether Eric would notice.

"I'm sad she's sad" Amelia said sighing. "I tried to cheer her up…but…maybe she'd like a present?"

"Mmm, she's kinda had presents today. You all have" I pointed out. What the hell else had Eric shoved in here? I looked behind the jumble of t-shirts. I'd talked him out of the Lladro clown. Lladro clowns just weren't my taste. This was…oh. A whole bunch of papers and stuff. Well they could have been shipped, couldn't they? I sighed. This just wasn't going to work and I was going to end up with some of this crap in my suitcase, I could see it now. I took Eric's good shoes out of the case and added them to my pile of packing.

Amelia gave up talking about Pam at that point anyway, and moved on to a subject she enjoyed a lot more. Herself. "Riley says he's got me something. A present. I wonder what it is?" she asked me. I hoped that was a rhetorical question, I didn't know how to break it to Amelia that fourteen year old boys weren't experts in purchasing thoughtful and romantic gifts. She might be in for a shock.

"I can't wait to get it!" Amelia said, with a certain amount of avarice.

"Don't get your hopes up" I said, kicking myself mentally as I did so. Nobody ever thanked you for being the voice of reason.

Amelia just gave me a really dismissive look. Probably what she wanted to say was 'just because you got a trip to Alcatraz and dim sum for your birthday, you're just jealous'. Yeah, I wasn't. I had learnt to appreciate each and every meal I didn't have to cook.

Felicia looked in. "Are you still packing?" she asked me.

"Yep" I confirmed.

"I packed my stuff" Felicia said.

"That's nice" I said, not adding I had to pack for a lot more people than just myself.

"I'm bored now" Felicia announced. Amelia rolled her eyes again.

"What's Dad doing?" I asked. I was pretty sure he'd come back with the boys.

"Looking at his laptop and saying 'fuck' a lot" Felicia informed me. She and I looked at each other, and then at Amelia. Yeah, God knows what that was all about.

And then Eric walked in anyway. "We are taking my shoes home, aren't we Sookie?" he asked, pointing to the ones I'd removed from his suitcase.

"Yes" I said, sounding a bit grumpy even to my own ears. I hated packing for other people.

"Pam's sad" Amelia said to Eric.

"And I'm bored" Felicia announced.

"What do we need cleaned?" Eric asked me.

"Not that bored" Felicia muttered.

"You can help me pack" I said to her.

"Really not that bored" Felicia said again, and then she left.

"I don't think it's nice that Pam's so sad" Amelia said, looking from me to Eric. Yeah, this wasn't one we could fix. Not easily, anyway.

At least, that was what I thought.

"I'll talk to her" Eric said, and he left as well. I didn't see that going well.

It didn't.

EPOV

I figured it was time to end Pam's incessant moping around the place. It was starting to affect the other kids as well, for a start. And I didn't see it being fucking pleasant sitting on a plane with her for fifteen-plus hours. Not when she was in this mood.

She was in the room she'd been sharing with Felicia, arranging toys on the bed. "Don't you have to pack those?" I asked her, and she didn't turn around.

I tried something else. "You know we're going tomorrow? So everything has to go in a suitcase, Pam. And there's no getting around that."

Pam turned around. "I don't want to go!" she hissed. "I want to stay here."

"You can't."

"Then it doesn't matter. Because I can't put Miriam in a suitcase, so I might as well leave everything here. I don't care. I DON'T CARE! You're just being mean to me!"

I wasn't going to get anywhere with her when she was hurling out fucking accusations, so I left. "Fine, Pam" I said, and I walked out.

"Stop being so mean!" she yelled after me, but I didn't respond. I was out of ideas now.

I found the boys in the kitchen. "Have you heard what's for dinner?" I asked them. I wasn't game to ask Sookie just at the moment, she seemed to be struggling a bit with the packing side of things.

"It's, uh, whatever you can find, you can eat" Sam said. "Which is…I think…kinda like Supermarket Surprise."

"But more stink" Tray added. "'cos this isn't a supermarket. It's the kitchen, and there's nothing to eat."

"Well there has to be something" I said to them. But Tray was right, there was fuck all to eat really.

"How's it going?" Sookie asked when she arrived.

"I have some sausages, some baked beans, some cheese and the bread" I said. "So…um…" I looked at Sookie.

"I'll just eat the beans as they are" Tray said, hovering with a spoon in hand.

"No, it's fine" Sookie said. "I'll do something." She set to work and not long afterwards we had bread cases cooked in a muffin tray filled with the baked beans, cheese and sausage. Huh. Well that was kind of impressive.

And so was the packing when I checked on it later on. "I think I got everything" Sookie said. "That ship is a bit of a pain though; it's taking up a lot of space. But I put your shoes in my case, and my shoes in Amelia's case, which is dicey, as she's likely to think they're her shoes now, and now we're good."

"We are" I agreed. And if I was fucking lucky, Sookie would figure out what to say to Pam to stop her hurting so fucking much.

SPOV

Our final morning in the house was basically a frantic countdown until we had to get in the cars and drive to the airport. Suddenly the kids all remembered the stuff they had stashed away which wasn't in their suitcases, they finally realised that actually they did have to put something in their carry-on bags so they weren't stuck for sixteen hours being entertained solely by counting the amount of times their father said 'fuck', and, in Tray's case, they wanted to present their theory that if they have to keep taking their shoes off in the airport, they might as well just go barefoot in the first place.

But Pam was still quiet. Pam was very quiet until it was time to go and say goodbye, once and for all, to Miriam.

Somehow I ended up with the job of escorting her over, Eric suddenly decided that actually Tray did make some very valid points and further analysis was required, and it was almost like I was walking her to some terrible fate. Poor Pam, she looked straight ahead and she didn't acknowledge me at all.

And when we got to the house next door, it was worse in a way. Pam scampered off to Miriam's room and left me with Rachel, so we could make small talk and try to pretend there wasn't a time limit on all of this and we'd have to pull the kids apart at the end. Rachel apologised again for Sam and Tray's hair, but I said it didn't really matter. It was only hair after all, and it would grow back.

Immanuel had been over earlier to say goodbye to the boys. It had taken about two seconds and then he'd gone home again. I think he'd been happy to have Sam and Tray to hang out with, and they had considered him a good swap for Pam as he mostly did what they wanted without arguing or trying to suggest they needed to wear costumes. There wasn't the same relationship there as there was with Pam and Miriam.

And then eventually, I couldn't make small talk anymore. I had to go and get her. "It's time to go, Pam" I said, as I looked into Miriam's bedroom. Oh yeah, that was a really nice room.

"I don't want to" Pam said in a small voice. "I want to stay here."

"Yeah, but we have to go. So say goodbye to Miriam and we'll head off. And when we get back to New Zealand you can send Miriam an email and tell her all about the flight." I tried to keep my voice nice and bright and not show any of the desperation I felt.

"Or I could just stay here" Pam said, brushing the hair of a Barbie doll.

"No, we have to go now" I said, as though we lived five minutes' away. "So let's get going."

"Everything is so unfair!" Pam wailed.

"Mmm" I said sympathetically. "It isn't easy."

"I hate Daddy!" Pam announced. "I hate him because he won't let me stay here."

Oh, that wasn't good. "Um, two more minutes then" I said, and I withdrew.

On my next attempt I finally managed to prise Pam out of the room, but not before Miriam had ceremoniously presented her with a necklace, it was one of those ones which were half a heart-shape and engraved on it were the words 'friends forever'. Miriam was wearing the matching half. Yeah, that didn't make it any better.

On the way back to Stan's house, which was soon to be Luna's house, Pam alternately raged about Eric and fretted about not having a gift for Miriam. I tried to only deal with the second of those problems. "Perhaps you've got something you could give her?" I said.

Pam looked thoughtful, and then she brightened. "The Barbie" she said. "The one that looks like me. I'll give her that, and then she won't forget me. Ever!"

The second trip to Miriam's house to hand over the Barbie was shorter, but more painful. Small girls weeping and clinging to each other is not a pleasant sight, and Rachel's eyes kept tearing up as well. I wanted to tell her to harden up, but it seemed mean when it was her daughter involved as well.

The walk back to the house this time was far worse. Pam was really riled up now. "I don't know why we can't stay here!" she said. "I mean, we could live here. Next to Miriam. But _Daddy_ doesn't want to, because he sucks!"

"No, he doesn't, none of us…" I was trying to explain that it wasn't just Eric who wanted to go home, that I was homesick too, but Pam cut me off. "He does SUCK! My whole life sucks, and it's all Daddy's fault! It was his fault we came here, and it's his fault we have to go home. I HATE DADDY! I HATE DADDY!" I could see Eric look out the back door at us, and clearly hear what Pam was saying, but he ducked back in again fairly quickly.

It was hard to blame him really.

Even if Pam was currently trying to pin everything on him.

EPOV

Letting Pam go next door again turned into another fucking disaster from the sound of the yelling when she came home. Mostly she was just yelling that she hated me, which was fucking terrific. None of this was my fault, and she fucking wouldn't let me fix it either. So we were stuck.

I wasn't unhappy with the way the family was being split up on the way to the airport. Sookie was driving the van, and had the three girls with her. I had Sam and Tray and some of the luggage.

Sam and Tray were mildly distracting, but I still spent a lot of the drive watching Sookie in the rear-view mirror and hoping like fuck that she remembered to stay on the right. Fuck. And every so often the windshield wipers went on randomly.

It was good we were going home, and not just because Sookie was shit at driving in this country. The further I got from Dad's place, the better I fucking felt. I fucking hated it here. I hated the fact that bits of my past, the people who used to think they knew me, were scattered around. Hated the fact that my fucking mother was lurking around when she'd never given a shit about me before. Hated the responsibility of going through all of Dad's shit and working out what was important and what wasn't.

It had been a shitty fucking time, and it was almost over. We just had to get on that plane.

The car I was in was noisy, and occasionally fucking smelly, but I didn't think Sookie's trip was exactly that great either. When we stopped to get gas, Sookie delivered her "You know that petroleum you're putting in the car is currently a liquid, don't you Eric?" speech that she'd given about a thousand times before, and then she sighed and looked off into the distance. "Pam's kind of wound up" she said.

"How bad?" I asked.

"Well, even Felicia's gone a bit quiet. There was a nasty incident where she called her Pom-Pom and I'm not sure if I'll ever find all the biscuits that got thrown."

That sounded fucking terrific. "You know that those biscuits that got thrown are actually cookies, don't you Sookie?" I asked, but all it garnered was a small, sad, smile. Fucking terrific.

Sookie shrugged. "Oh well. I guess if the Air Marshals cart her off we'll only have ourselves to blame. It's usually the parents' fault in these situations." And then she turned and got back in the van.

SPOV

The drive to the airport was fraught. For one thing, I could almost feel Eric's exasperation from the car in front every time I put the windscreen wipers on by accident or wanted to drive in the left-hand lane. But mostly because of Pam.

Amelia and Felicia were really worried about it all, I could tell, as they clammed up. Possibly that was also a defence mechanism to stop being yelled at, but they didn't look happy. None of us were happy. And we were supposed to be happy. We were going home, I wanted to sing and dance and kiss Eric and embarrass all the kids who'd yell "Euw! Not in front of us!", but I couldn't because I was so worried about Pam.

But Pam was prickly and didn't want anyone's sympathy. At this point she was out for blood.

And it was catching. When we returned the hire cars, Tray picked up on the fact that Pam was out of sorts and decided to bait her. I expected her to react badly, what I didn't expect was for Felicia to step in instead. I didn't even really see it happening, but Tray ended up pinned to the floor with Felicia on top of him and Eric had to prise them apart.

So it looked as though the seating for the plane might have to be revised.

We got through check-in…just. I was a bit worried it was Tray who was going to be carried off by an Air Marshal. Having been bested by Felicia he was out to prove himself and he was getting a bit belligerent and annoying. In fact all the kids were a bit annoying. I wondered why I'd ever wanted to go home so badly.

And then we got to the departure gate and it all got worse. Pam finally realised that there was no going back, I think, and that this was it, she was leaving Miriam behind.

"It's not fair!" she said, for about the hundredth time. "I don't see why we have to go home."

"Lots of reasons" I said to her, getting weary of the same old arguments. "There are more reasons to go, than to stay."

"No one cares about me" Pam grumbled.

"Everyone cares about you, Pam" I said. "Look at Felicia, trying to beat Tray up for you before. She's upset that you're sad, but no one can fix it."

"Daddy can" Pam said. "Daddy could fix it, but he doesn't want to." I tried to ignore her, but she pressed on. "If Daddy let us stay here, it would be OK. That's his house now, I heard him say it was. So we could stay there. And I'd be next to Miriam. But I'm not! I'm going to be so far away! You don't care! No one cares!"

I could see Eric making his way through the seats with the boys. They'd been on an expedition to the bathroom, and Tray was trying to trip Sam up and Sam was doing his best to ignore him. Eric just looked warily at Pam. Pam saw him coming and obviously decided it was a good time for a confrontation, because crowded airports are the best places for families to implode.

God, I felt sorry for that poor young guy with a backpack sitting further down the row from us.

"It's your fault!" Pam said to Eric. "It's your fault we have to go home."

"Pam" Eric said quietly and firmly. "Just leave it."

"No!" Pam said. "No, it's not fair. You've ruined my life!"

"Pam, you're only five, your life is not ruined. You are simply being overly-dramatic. You need to stop now." Eric gave her the look that was designed to make her do what he wanted.

That did not work on Pam. In fact usually it had the opposite effect.

"No!" Pam said. "No I won't! I hate you and you can't make me stop! I hate you and I hate New Zealand and I hate everyone who isn't Miriam! Miriam's my friend. I just want to be with Miriam!"

"You can't" Eric said, stopping in front of her. "You can't and that's the end of it." Eric had stopped being quiet. I looked at the guy with the backpack and wondered just how effective those headphones of his were. How much noise would they cancel?

"No!" Pam said. "No, no, no!" And then she went for Eric, really went for him, well, for his legs anyway. Oh, that really wasn't a good look. I wasn't sure how the airport authorities were going to take this show, even if the perpetrator was only five and was taking on someone nearly three times her size.

The other kids were wondering too, a hush fell over the family and even Tray stopped trying to get Sam to punch him back. We all just watched Pam as she pummelled Eric and then gave up and gave him a good kick in the shins. That really did have to hurt. Pam might have been small, but she was putting a lot of effort into trying to hurt Eric at this point in time. Eric had to be feeling it.

But he took it. Possibly because he was afraid that if he retaliated, the Air Marshals would take him away instead. I didn't know what the laws were in the States like I did at home, but I could bet they didn't take kindly to grown men hitting little girls.

Eric didn't hit back though. He let Pam get all the blows in. "It's not fair!" she said. "It's just not fair." Eric didn't say anything to that.

And when Pam finally looked like she was running out of steam, Eric just scooped her up and held her against his chest. "It's not fair!" she sobbed into his shoulder. "It's not fair, Daddy!"

Eric didn't tell her was fair, or that it was going to be OK, or that she'd forget Miriam in a little while because she was only five. He just said "It never is, Pam. It never is."

Pam cried on Eric's shoulder right up until they called us to board, all the way down the gangplank, and up until he absolutely had to put her into her seat so the plane could take off. The cabin crew were all very sympathetic, and wanted to know if they could help, but Eric shook his head.

I could have done with some help, dealing, as I was with four other kids and assorted hand luggage, but I managed. At least I wasn't stuck sitting in a soaked t-shirt all the way through to Auckland like Eric was. I was surprised that Pam could produce that amount of tears to be honest.

But things at least got quieter on the flight. Mainly because Pam, exhausted by the emotional and physical exertions she'd been under, promptly fell asleep. It meant that Tray, who was sitting the other side of her in the window seat, ate most of her dinner, but that was OK. Well, none of us were going to tell her it happened anyway.

I had the seats in the centre aisle with Sam, who was happy to have free reign of his own entertainment selection and no one trying to kick or punch him, on one side of me, and Felicia and then Amelia on the other. Felicia got a bit bored though and started reading one of Amelia's romance books. "It's just stupid" she said. "I mean, why the hell would some big actor end up in that stupid town anyway?"

"Well, his car broke down" Amelia said. "And he liked it. And he fell in love."

"In two freaking minutes! And then his own father couldn't find him, but all those photographers did, so she ended up with her picture on the website with him and stuff? It's just really weird."

"It's not weird" Amelia mumbled, and went back to writing emails to Riley. I thought Felicia gave up but she didn't. Unfortunately she found the sex scene. "And then…well, that's not right" she said, half to herself and half to Amelia. "I mean…oh. I don't…in a chair…that's…" I wasn't sure what it was, but I turned in time to see the look of horror on Felicia's face as she looked at me.

I supposed eventually one of them was going to figure out that it was kind of odd to keep a nursing chair around when your youngest kid was at school.

Pam did eventually wake up in time to break out the craft supplies she'd had for the flight over, the sticky string stuff that you made pictures from. I could hear her scolding Eric, "No, Daddy! You can't make a car with it; it's for making puppies and kittens. See? It says on the box. It's the puppies and kittens set."

"I think you can use it for whatever you want, Pam" Eric grumbled.

"No, that's not right, Daddy" Pam said. "But I'll let you anyway."

"Can I have some?" Tray asked. "I want to make a Corvette that flies."

By the time we reached Auckland even Felicia had recovered from her earlier shock enough to go back to singing her new favourite song. I wasn't quite sure at what point Felicia had discovered Green Day, but I was fairly sure that if Eric heard her sing "Don't wanna be an American idiot" one more time, words might be exchanged.

Or not. Because he seemed in a fairly good mood. Especially for someone who'd just flown across the Pacific with his kids in tow. He looked far happier than I'd seen him in a while. Even Pam looked OK, I figured she was feeling better now she knew that there was someone else who shared her view that actually sometimes the world was kind of crappy and you were just stuck with it.

And Eric was even better when we finally walked in front door. "Brrr" I said, jumping on the spot. "It's colder here than it is outside the house. That's the problem when the house hasn't been heated for a couple of weeks. I almost miss the summer we just left."

"I don't" Eric said firmly, grabbing me in a big hug. "I do not miss anything about that fucking place", and then he turned around to see Pam standing there. "I still miss Miriam" she said sadly, and I really hoped she wasn't going to have another meltdown, but she didn't. "But I do like home" she said, before she trudged down to her bedroom.

EPOV

Getting home was the best fucking thing ever. And getting Pam somewhat back to normal felt pretty good too. It was fucking horrible watching her lose it over the kid from next door, and there wasn't anything I could do but stand there and take it.

And apparently, add to the bring-Miriam-to-New-Zealand fund from time to time. "So if I tidy your clothes on the chair, how much money do I get?" Pam asked me, the second day we were home.

"Don't touch that chair!" Felicia yelled as she walked past the room, which was just fucking weird. But I'd let Sookie worry about that one.

**Thanks for reading! And there will be a bit more of this story, although not too much more. A few chapters anyway.**


	46. Chapter 46

**A/N So, somewhat typically for Auckland, we had a crappy, wet summer and have now been having a gorgeous autumn with days and days of sunshine. I went to the beach last Saturday and managed to get sunburned. And yesterday was Anzac Day, so it was a public holiday (it's when we wear poppies and remember those who fought for our country), so we got to enjoy the weather again. But that's kind of why I'm a bit behind on writing...well it feels like it to me anyway. Probably no one else noticed :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I guess it was inevitable that I would get the phone call. It felt like the first Friday I'd had to myself in a while, first I'd had sick kids home with me after the trip to the States. A combination of a change in temperature and the start of school after the holidays meant there were a collection of sore throats and snotty noses which went on for a couple of weeks. Then we had the Friday of Eric's vasectomy, which meant playing nursemaid for the day making him soup with crackers while he lay in bed and lied outright about all the aftercare treatment he was supposed to get and asked me on a regular basis to check out the bruising because "It's really gone a funny colour now." Yes it had, but that's not the comforting answer to give, apparently.

And the previous Friday had somehow disappeared in a blur of washing and cleaning and catching up again, so this week I was going to have a little time for me. I had a shiny new book, and a nice cup of tea and I was going to leave the housework for a bit and just enjoy the time by myself.

But no sooner had I got the kids off to school and sat myself down, than the phone rang. I hoped it was simply one of those telemarketers trying to sell me a financial plan.

"Oh, good you're there, love" Aunty Linda said, when I answered. "You're not busy today are you?"

"No" I said, sighing mentally. My new book didn't really count, did it?

"It's just Trev's in Middlemore…" she said.

"Hospital?" I asked.

"Yeah. He was doing some woodworking in the garage and took off a fingertip. We've still got it, but they don't think they can attach it again. So we're just waiting for the surgeon. Only we've got Ryder with us, because I had him today and Had's in Raro…"

"Rarotonga?"

"Yeah, she and Tony have gone for a week by themselves. First time she's ever been overseas. She was so excited, love, because, well, she didn't do all that travelling when she was young, did she? Not like you did. Well, she had Hunter, so she couldn't. So this was her big trip and I said I'd have Ryder, because we love Ryder, don't we Trev?" There was a pause. "He's looking a bit pale, love. I hope they come soon."

Well none of that sounded good, apart from the bit about having a week in Rarotonga without kids. That sounded pretty good.

"So, um…" I asked. "You need me to come?"

"Well, if you could take Ryder, that'd be a help love. I wasn't sure what to do with him, he keeps running off into the corridor and I don't want him getting in the way of the doctors, but I thought Sookie'll do it, because she's great with kids."

Nothing like guilting me into it. But it was always the same, if you had a lot of kids, or you worked with kids, or if, like me, you did both, then people made assumptions. Like the one that you always wanted to look after everyone else's kids. It was bad enough when random parents from school tried to dump me with their kids because after all, I had so many what was one more? But now I'd lost my Friday. Bugger.

I could hear Ryder in the background saying "Nana. Up Nana", and then Aunty Linda said "Watch Poppa's hand love, it's very very sore."

I suppressed a sigh. Middlemore hospital was really no place for Ryder to spend the morning hanging out with his great-grandparents. There wasn't much I could do really. "Are you still in A and E?" I asked Aunty Linda, and she said yes, and then I told her I'd be there as soon as I could. I took one more sip of tea, and went to find my shoes and my keys and get out the door. Ivan looked at me hopefully, but I had to break the bad news to him that he was on his own for a bit.

I jumped in my car and started to back out of the driveway, but then I had a thought and drove forward again, got out, and went into the garage. After a few minutes muttering about Eric's inability to keep the place tidy I finally found what I was looking for, which was one of our carseats. I had a booster seat in the car, because Pam still used one from time to time when her brothers were good enough not to tease her about it, but I didn't use carseats anymore.

So it took me a few minutes to try to remember how it fitted into the car, and then about ten minutes more to actually fit it. I was out of practice with all of this. Which worried me slightly, was I going to be out of practice with a toddler too? Sure, I saw them at all the classes I ran, well, toddlers and babies, but they had care-givers there to be responsible for them, I was just the lady who demonstrated shoulder rolls, and then sang songs and blew bubbles.

It couldn't be that hard, could it? To go back to having a small boy around. You didn't just forget these things overnight did you? I might have repressed some of the things that had happened to me, when Sam and Tray were running around removing clothes and peeing on the floor and stealing food and their sisters' toys and harassing Bob and trying to escape out the door, out of the car, or out of the pushchair, but I was pretty sure I still remembered the basics. As long as you fed them, kept an eye on them, and gave them a nap, they'd be OK.

I was starting to worry about what I'd got myself into. I had to remind myself that it was highly unlikely it would be that bad. For a start, Ryder wasn't related to Eric. Maybe he'd take after me and be lovely.

I got to the hospital and parked and then found my way to the accident and emergency department and asked at the desk where Trev was, and I was directed to a cubicle off a corridor. I was a bit worried about drawing back the curtain and finding I'd disturbed some other poor person having got my directions mixed up, but, luckily, I could hear Aunty Linda chatting. From quite a way away.

"I was going to be a nurse, back when I left school. But I met my husband and it didn't turn out well for me, did it Trev?" Uncle Trev was silent. "So I missed my chance, because I couldn't really go back to it once I had my daughter. I did that Red Cross meals on wheels for a while though, when Hads was at school. I liked that, and the old folks, they were so grateful to have someone come to visit, some of them. My Mum used to say that she was glad that wasn't going to be her, but then my brother and his wife died and that really…oh, hello, Sookie love."

"Hi" I said. "How're you doing Uncle Trev?"

"Oh. You know" Uncle Trev said eloquently. Well I didn't really, I wasn't the one lying on a hospital bed missing a fingertip while a nurse took my pulse, but I took that to mean he wasn't at death's door.

Ryder, who was sitting on Aunty Linda's knee, looked at me with big, brown eyes and he didn't look happy. I guess this was not part of his usual routine at all. "You remember Aunty Sookie, don't you Ryder?" Aunty Linda said to him, but he didn't say anything at all.

He looked kind of terrified of me, but I was sure he'd feel better in a bit. "Hi, Ryder" I said, and he tried to shrink back against Aunty Linda. Huh. I wasn't used to being the scary one between the two of us.

Aunty Linda showed me the backpack that had all of Ryder's things. "There's clothes and nappies and his book" she said. "You have to read _The Little Yellow Digger_ before he has a nap. And then he has to sleep with it, love. I don't know why." I didn't know why either, but it seemed to be standard operating procedure if you were a small boy. And then, when you went for a walk, if you came across any diggers you had to stand around and admire them for at least half an hour while they worked. I had spent quite a bit of Sam and Tray's toddlerhoods watching diggers.

"And here's his jacket, because it's a bit nippy today, isn't it Ryder?" Aunty Linda continued. Ryder didn't say anything; he just kept trying to cling to Aunty Linda.

"OK, well we'll get going then. Call me later on and let me know how it goes. You take care Uncle Trev."

"Will do, love" he said. "Tell you what though, I could murder a cuppa."

"Maybe that nice nurse will bring us one?" Aunty Linda mused. I didn't like her chances. "Bye, Ryder love" she said bending to kiss him. "Nana will see you later on."

I picked up Ryder's bag and slung it over my shoulder, held his jacket in one hand and tried to pull him along with the other hand. He wasn't exactly compliant. "Come on, Ryder" I said, brightly. "Let's go and do something fun!" I hoped to God he wasn't one of those two year olds who remembered everything you said and held you to it, because at that point in time I had no idea quite what that fun was going to be. Maybe it would be folding the washing?

Ryder looked less than convinced and I wondered if he suspected that laundry folding might be on the cards. "I have lots of toys at my house" I said. That was true. Technically they weren't mine, but well…kids never knew what happened when they were at school. It wouldn't be the first time I'd had to do a mad rush to return borrowed toys and games just before someone came home from school.

Ryder looked mildly interested. "You'll be fine, love" Aunty Linda said to him. "Go on, it'll be much more fun than it is here."

Ryder finally started shuffling along beside me, his big brown eyes looking worriedly at my legs. And then Aunty Linda called out "Oh, Sookie. His carseat."

"Don't worry" I said, over my shoulder. "I've got one of mine in the car."

"That's great, love" aunty Linda said. "I knew that's why you were the best choice for this. You'll have all the stuff, won't you? And a cot and everything."

Well, no. I didn't have a cot. But Ryder would be OK sleeping in a bed, I was sure of it. It wasn't like he had a choice.

"Yep. Talk to you later. Take care!" I said, and then I led Ryder back through the corridors and out the main entrance, where I stopped to put on his jacket. "It's a bit cold" I said to him, but I didn't get a reply. That was OK though. For one thing, he hadn't stopped holding my hand and run off after anyone, or asked for food, or complained bitterly about having to be here. Or bitten anyone. He seemed to be a step up on my kids.

We shivered our way back to the carpark; the wind was biting around the back of the hospital. And then I had to fiddle with adjusting the straps for the carseat and trying to get it fastened over Ryder's coat. All the time he just watched me and didn't say anything. "It'll be OK" I said. "Aunty…I mean, Nana will be able to come and get you soon. Just as soon as Uncle Trev's finger is all better."

"Poppa" Ryder said, sadly.

"Yeah" I agreed. "Poppa."

I climbed into the driver's seat and turned around to look at Ryder. "Are you hungry?" I asked him, and he gave a small nod, so I rummaged in my bag and managed to drag up a fruit bar that was so squashed it was probably inedible, and a small box of raisins. I handed Ryder the raisins and he looked at them sadly. Maybe he didn't like raisins? Then I twigged, so I reached back, took the box back off him, opened the lid, and handed it back. That got a better reception.

Jeez, I'd forgotten what it was like when you had to do everything for them.

Soon after leaving the hospital the petrol light came on in my car. "Bugger" I muttered as quietly as I could. I was pretty sure Ryder wouldn't have heard me from the back seat. And his grandmother probably said worse, I couldn't imagine Hadley toning down her language.

It was still weird she was a grandmother.

We stopped at the tiny little petrol station on Mt Eden Road and I got out and said hello to the nice attendant who came out to put petrol in the car. I liked that they still did that here. Then I looked in the glove box for one of those vouchers for a petrol discount, and then I handed Ryder the squashed fruit bar to eat, having carefully removed it, in pieces, from its wrapper. Then I went inside to pay.

Only I'd only walked two steps and I stopped. Could I leave a toddler in the car? On a petrol station forecourt? When he wasn't mine? I mean, it was literally five paces to the front door of the building and it seemed a shame to unstrap him when it had taken so long to jam him into that seat…but I just couldn't do it.

I walked back, opened the door and then stood for a few moments in the cold wind while Ryder tried valiantly to eat the fruit bar. Most of it just crumbled onto him, the carseat and the car floor. I unstrapped him and carried him in. When I got to the counter I put him down by my feet and handed over my credit card to pay, refusing the attendant's offer of 3 for 2 chocolate bars and having to dig around in my pocket for the voucher I'd shoved in there when I'd picked up Ryder.

And when I looked down, Ryder wasn't there.

That wasn't what I expected. There was no way Tray got that from my side of the family. I looked around and couldn't see him. The place was tiny, where could he have gone?

Please, please, please not out through the automatic doors and into the path of a car. He was too small to make them work, wasn't he? He wouldn't have followed a stranger out, would he?

Well, he'd been sent away with me, maybe he thought it was OK to hang out with strangers now.

I found him in the aisle with the confectionary, clutching a bag of M&Ms. "There you are!" I said brightly.

A woman who was probably ten years older than me and who'd been looking at the racks of magazines, looked at us both. "Oh, they're full of energy when they're this age" she said to me. "But you'll miss it when they're older."

Huh. Did I look that flustered? After all the training Tray had put me through? It was probably only because Ryder wasn't mine. "Oh, I have five. Kids. My eldest is fourteen, so…you know."

"Oh" she said, looking surprised. "That's a big, uh, spread."

"Well, my youngest is five. This, uh, Ryder isn't mine. He's my cousin's…grandson" I said, trying to work out who exactly he was. I wasn't sure what relation that made him to me, maybe none. Aunty Sookie seemed to be covering it for the moment anyway.

"Oh" the woman said again.

"She's in Raro" I said, clearly starting to over-supply information. I was like the anti-Eric. "She has four kids and this is her first grandkid." I did my sums again in my head, thinking that sounded wrong. No, Hadley and I really did have nine kids between us.

Well, that sounded like a lot.

"I should go and pay for my petrol" the woman said, glancing out to the petrol pumps and her car.

"Yes, and we should go home shouldn't we?" I said to Ryder. He was still clutching those M&Ms. Bum. First rule of babysitting: don't be the bad guy.

"Let's go and buy those first" I said to him.

We drove back home, and I kept trying to make conversation, but Ryder didn't say a lot, he just ate his M&Ms. I couldn't tell whether it was because he was still wary of me, or whether he just wasn't one of those toddlers who did talk much. Tray hadn't used a lot of words, but then that had been OK because who would have heard him over three older kids anyway.

I parked in the driveway and got inside the house as fast as I could. I hated this part of winter, it always got nasty and wet and cold in August, just when you thought that maybe it was going to be spring soon.

Ivan came racing down the hallway to meet us and poor Ryder let out a shriek and tried to climb me. "No doggie!" he yelled. "No doggie!"

Well, that was going to be interesting.

"Don't worry" I said to Ryder. "It's just Ivan…he's mostly harmless." I realised I would have to retract that statement as Ivan circled around me excitedly, just about knocking Ryder over in the process. "No doggie!" Ryder said again, holding out his arms to be picked up.

I picked up Ryder and carried him into the kitchen putting him on one of the high stools at the breakfast bar, and then I went to get Ivan with a view to shutting him in the laundry for a bit. I got back to the kitchen just in time to see Ryder try to turn the stool around, wobble, cling to the side of the bench and let out a high-pitched squeal of fright as the seat started to slip away from underneath him.

I grabbed him and held him on my hip while he whimpered in fright, and I wasn't sure if he was more scared now of the furniture falling away from underneath him or the dog that was still dancing around me. I grabbed Ivan's collar again and with my free hand dragged him into the laundry, and then held him back with my foot while I managed to get the sliding door shut, leaving Ivan whining on the other side of it. Mission accomplished. I'd forgotten what it was like to have to do things one-handed while someone clung to your hip. I'd forgotten a lot of things, obviously, like the fact that bar-stools and toddlers don't mix.

Although I remembered that Tray fell off them a couple of times. Maybe I was just a bad mother? And not as careful with my own kids? Oh well.

"Right, let's get you something to play with" I said to Ryder and he looked at me and blinked. After a stop in the bathroom to wipe up his tears and the lovely trail of snot he'd developed, we went into the boys' room.

I finally managed to detach Ryder long enough to put him on the floor. "Don't touch anything on the table" I said, hoping he wasn't too entranced with the table that held all of Tray's Lego creations. He got really annoyed if anyone touched it and Sam had paid the price for breaking that rule on occasion. Transgressions were dealt with noisily and with a fair amount of violence.

I opened up the wardrobe. Boy, that was a mistake. "Bugger!" I said, loudly, as a Meccano set landed on my foot.

"Um…" I said, thinking, and rubbing my foot. "I didn't say that. What I said was crumbs. Crumbs!" I looked at Ryder, I wasn't sure any of it was sinking in. I turned back to the wardrobe. "I'm sure that somewhere in here, there is a box of cars and stuff that you could play with that isn't really used anymore…God, there's so much stuff jammed in here though, I'll never find it. I don't know what the hell we're going to do when all the stuff we shipped from the States turns up. Hopefully it's on a slow boat to China about now." I finally found the box I was looking for and pulled it out, managing to avoid having about three board games land on my head at the same time. "Right" I said to Ryder. "Let's go to the family room."

I held the box under one arm and then had to put it down on the bed in order to pick Ryder up after he just stood there looking at me, and then try to balance the box again. Wobbling slightly, I made my way down the hall, only Eddie decided to kamikaze in front of me part-way down.

"If I fall on you, I will squish you" I warned him, but it didn't seem to deter him. He followed Ryder and I into the family room and, after I put Ryder on the floor, Eddie and Ryder stared at each other for a bit.

"That's Eddie" I said to Ryder, taking the lid off the box.

"Cat. Meow!" Ryder said.

"That's right" I agreed. Conversation lapsed, while Ryder dug through the box and pulled stuff out. Eddie inspected a few toys by sniffing them, and Ryder looked at him suspiciously. I guessed he wasn't used to pets.

When Ryder had enough things out, he slowly pushed the cars around the floor making a few 'brrm-brrm' noises. I thought of my book, languishing in the kitchen, and wondered if it would be rude to read it while he played. Even if playing seemed to involve an awful lot of driving cars into my leg and not much else that actually required my input.

Had I really spent all my days like this at one point in time?

"Water" Ryder said.

"Please" I prompted.

"Peese" Ryder parroted.

I went to get him a drink and discovered I didn't, in fact, have any sipper cups any more. I'd have to make do with a plastic tumbler and a straw cut down to fit it. I carried that back to the family room. "Careful" I warned Ryder. He took a sip and put it on the floor next to him, where it lasted for a while before his foot kicked it over before I could move it out of the way. I needed faster reflexes, clearly. I was sure I'd used to have them, but I'd been daydreaming about the day I'd planned and wasn't paying attention.

I got a towel and mopped up the spot, thankful that it was at least just water and then the phone rang, which was a bit of a relief and I went to answer it, hoping it might be Eric. It wasn't, it was Tara who was bored at work and couldn't get her banking to add up and had a bit of a hangover from the function she'd been to the night before so wanted to natter rather than work. I had to break the bad news to her I was on babysitting duty.

"Well, I guess it's second-nature to you" Tara commented. "I mean, your kids are still small. Mine are so old now I'd be hopeless at it. I mean, what do you do with toddlers?"

"Yeah" I said. "It's, uh, tricky." Also, very boring. Tara chatted briefly, then got the hint and said goodbye. I hung up and let the still-whining Ivan out of the laundry and shooed him out the door onto the deck, much to his annoyance. The cloud was lifting and it was getting sunnier, although still cold. He'd live.

When I got back to the family room, Ryder was grunting and going red in the face. Oh, good God, no.

"Pooey" he announced.

"Yeah, um…thanks for telling me. Let's get you a clean nappy then" I said, remembering the rules for getting your toddler ready for toilet training. So glad I wouldn't have to do that again. Bummer that I was stuck with a nappy full of poo right at this moment, though.

I escorted Ryder to the bathroom, our changing table have long since been donated to the garage sale the local Plunket did annually to raise funds, and then went to get his backpack from the hall. I pulled out the disposable change mat, a nappy, some wipes and realised I was stalling because I really, really didn't want to go in and see what was lurking in that nappy.

Eventually I couldn't put it off any longer. I got Ryder to lie down, which wasn't easy, and cleaned him up as best I could while he wriggled around and didn't want to lie still. I put the evidence in a plastic bag. Yep, that was pretty grotty all round. Ryder made a break for it out of the bathroom, so I hauled him back and re-dressed him and put all his stuff away in his bag. "You go back to the toys" I said to him. "And I'll go and put this in the bin."

I ran out the front door and down to the bin beside the garage, and then back inside again. Only when I got there, Ryder wasn't in the family room with all the cars. Eddie was; he was curled in a ball with a small truck tucked against his tummy. But no Ryder.

"Ryder!" I called, and I didn't get an answer. That did not bode well, I remembered that much. Whenever any of my kids went missing it always meant they were up to no good.

I started checking the house and located Ryder in Pam's bedroom. "Toys" he said, pulling all the pieces of tea-set out of the big plastic box they lived in beside the little plastic oven. There had been a lot of tea-sets over the years and the box was a big jumble of stuff.

"Yes" I agreed. "Toys." These toys seemed to be more to Ryder's liking and he made me several cups of tea in quick succession, as well as giving me some of the plastic food to pretend eat. If I didn't do a good enough job of pretending I got a very stern "Try eet!" from him. It was slightly more entertaining than the toy cars had been, but still fairly repetitive.

Toddlers were not the most entertaining people in the world, that was for sure. I tried to remember if my own kids had been able to hold scintillating conversations at this age. I suspected not.

After a while Ryder went over to investigate Pam's wardrobe, the door of which wasn't completely closed. The hiss from inside the wardrobe alerted me to the fact he'd located Stan and I stood up and moved Ryder away from the door. "Don't touch Stan" I warned. "He bites."

"Bitey?" Ryder asked, worriedly.

"Yeah" I said. "But only if you poke him."

Ryder looked a bit worried and then climbed up on Pam's bed. "Bunny" he said, holding onto Mr Fluffy.

"Pam's bunny" I said to him. He looked blank. Yeah, Pam didn't mean anything to him. "Best leave it here."

"No bunny?" Ryder asked, sadly.

"No. No bunny. Let's go and get some lunch." I held out my hand and Ryder followed me. I made a mental note to re-organise Pam's bed later on as Ryder had managed to move every one of her pillows and soft toys in the process of liberating Mr Fluffy.

"How do you feel about fish fingers?" I asked, once we'd reached the kitchen. Ryder didn't say anything so I took that as a yes.

"Hey, you know what we should do?" I asked Ryder. I didn't get a reply. I wasn't really surprised. It was kind of exhausting talking to yourself, which was possibly why I'd come up with this plan. "We should text Uncle Eric and get him to come home and have lunch with us. That'd be fun!"

Ryder didn't seem to have an opinion on that one either. I grabbed my phone out of my handbag and quickly sent a text which read 'If you're around, come home for lunch. It'll be fun!' It wasn't so much that I wanted Eric to come home and entertain Ryder because I was bored of doing it, it was just that…yeah, I wanted Eric to come home and entertain Ryder. He was good with small boys, after all.

I went to the laundry and pulled out some fish fingers, and then some peas. "Let's have peas too!" I said to Ryder brightly, and then I lunged to stop him tipping the bowl of water for the cats all over himself. I'd forgotten what a magnet that was. "I'll just put that up here" I said, putting it on the bench. "But anyway, I hope you like peas. I like peas. Most of the kids like peas. And I'll put butter on them, so that'll make them less pea-like anyway. But it's a cold day and I think warm, buttery peas will be nicer than something like cold carrot sticks, don't you? And I would apologise for talking so much, but you hang out with Aunty Linda all the time, so you're probably used to it."

Ryder still didn't say anything. "Nana" I corrected myself.

"Nana here?" Ryder asked, looking around.

"No" I said, adding butter to the peas I'd put in a microwave jug. "No, but she'll be here later on."

Ryder just stared at me. My phone buzzed and there was a text from Eric to say he was on his way, just as I moved Ryder away from a cupboard he was investigating before a pile of mixing bowls fell on his head. It had been a lot easier in the days when all the cupboards had sported kid-proof locks on them.

I wondered briefly if he'd maybe misconstrued that text. He'd been angling for sex for a few nights now, having declared himself all healed despite the fact I wasn't prepared to go along with some of his more outlandish requests for nursing, but I hadn't really been in the mood, bogged down with the demands of the week and endless housework and kid dramas.

I got my answer when Eric arrived in the kitchen having, for once, neglected to announce his arrival at the front door. "I am here!" Eric said, and then he saw Ryder sitting in the middle of the floor and he paused. "And so is he" Eric said.

"Yep, and you're in time for lunch" I said, as I started putting fish fingers on plates.

"Uh-huh" Eric said, still staring at Ryder. "You know Sookie, I wouldn't have had the vasectomy if I'd known you'd just go out and steal a baby."

"Ha-ha" I said to him. "You remember Ryder?" Eric looked blank. "Hunter and Jenny's son. Likes to drool on you. I'm looking after him for Aunty Linda as Uncle Trev cut off his finger tip and they're at Middlemore. Hadley's in Raro with Tony, lucky thing."

"I think I understood about 78 per cent of what you said there" Eric told me. "And I have to say, I feel slightly let-down. I didn't realise that I was coming home just to eat."

"My text did not promise you anything" I said.

"There was a distinct subtext" Eric mused. "And it wasn't suggestive of a lunch of fish sticks."

"Fish fingers" I corrected. Eric rolled his eyes dramatically. "Because the name makes all the difference" he said. "Whatever way you look at it, it's still processed fish."

"And peas with butter. So go and wash up and we'll sit down for lunch." Eric turned and started to walk out of the room. "Oh, and take Ryder to wash his hands too."

Eric stopped and looked at Ryder. Ryder looked at Eric. He looked a bit worried about it all. "Come on" Eric said. "Let's wash up." Ryder picked himself off the floor and trotted after Eric, with one worried glance back at me. Yeah, the accent got you at first, but Ryder would get used to it.

I tried not to feel too glad I had Eric home now, but it was kind of a relief. It wasn't that I didn't think I could cope; it was just a bit boring. And now I had another adult to talk to, one who could probably be persuaded to play with Ryder, things would be much better. After all, Eric and I were old hands at this. One toddler to two adults was a really good ratio.

I might even get to read my book.

**Middlemore hospital is the main hospital for South Auckland. Plunket is the organisation which provides a lot of care and advice to parents and young children. Plunket nurses track growth in kids from about 6 weeks to 5 years. They exist mainly as a charity and they're pretty terrific.**

_**The Little Yellow Digger**_** is by Betty and Alan Gilderdale. It is a much-beloved NZ children's book.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	47. Chapter 47

**A/N Well those of you interested in the toddler can have the sad news that some of her baby talk is disappearing. Now instead of 'loom' I get 'living room' and there's no more 'p.t. butter' only peanut butter. When we start getting elephants instead of effalents I'll be very sad.**

**As for the cat, yesterday he caught and ate a praying mantis and then washed it down with a sparkly sticker he found on the floor. Tonight as an experiment my hubby gave him a pea that was still frozen. He ate it. Hubby is banned from more experiments, I can't face the vet bills.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, I own a copy of Deadlocked which is apparently currently sitting in a courier warehouse. Ho hum, roll on tomorrow.**

EPOV

I loved Sookie very much, but she did from time to time send fucking mixed signals. There had been a lot of things over the years that she swore just happened. Like the fact she'd grind her ass against me in bed. Or the constant leaning over at the dinner table. Granted a lot of that was due to the kids who needed things cut up, mopped up or dished up, but there was still a lot of bending over. There was a few other things as well, but Sookie would always deny any provocation was intended.

The text message, however, was pretty fucking blatant. It was quite clearly intended to bring me home with the idea there would be sex. After all, I'd been pretty fucking clear for at least the last three days that I was more than happy to test out what post-vasectomy sex was like, but Sookie had been tired and not really in the mood. But that was OK, because Friday had dawned and when I'd asked her what she was up to, she'd made vague mention of a book she wanted to read and having a nice relaxing day.

Which all sounded great. Sookie could read her porn by herself, while I got on with the work I had to do, and then we could meet up at lunchtime while we still had the house to ourselves. It all seemed like a fucking good plan.

The plan did not involve random toddlers. Random toddlers called Ryder who were here to eat all our fish sticks and generally fuck up my afternoon.

"We're all washed up" I said to Sookie, as I walked back into the kitchen.

"Yeah…but where's Ryder?" Sookie asked. I looked behind me. He wasn't there. "He was in the bathroom with me" I said to her. He had been. I had to say I didn't miss having constant company in there like I had when our kids were small.

"And then where did he go?" Sookie asked. I had no fucking clue. I'd told him to follow me, the fact that he hadn't was just…well, it was what they did at that age, I seemed to remember.

Ryder walked in. "He's here now" I said.

"Oh. No, sweetheart" Sookie said to him. "That's Pam's bunny." Yeah, that was Mr Fluffy.

"Pam won't mind" I said to Sookie, and she pulled a face at me. "Pam isn't here" I amended, and Sookie shrugged. "Well, just put him down. He can't come to lunch."

I managed to get Ryder to loosen his death-grip on poor Mr Fluffy and we sat down at the table. Only, Ryder couldn't see over it.

"Where's the booster seat?" I asked Sookie.

"In the garage…I think. So good luck with that" Sookie said, kind of snarkily. Not sure why she was pissed. I was the one who'd got the text telling me there was sex when actually there were only fish sticks.

"I'll get him a cushion" Sookie sighed, and she walked off leaving me alone with Ryder. Ryder just looked at me. "I sit your lap?" he asked.

"Um…" I said, trying to remember if you had to be polite to toddlers. "A cushion would be better." He looked kind of sad at that, but then Sookie came back into the room with the cushion and he brightened. Of course he did. He was getting all her fucking attention.

Well, that felt a little mean. But I felt kind of entitled. After all, it might have been my idea but I did think the vasectomy entitled me to a certain amount of after-care. And Sookie hadn't been on board with some of the suggestions I'd made but I did not think that sex was totally outside the scope of what I could expect.

And today, with the house to ourselves for a few hours, would have been a fucking perfect time to give it a test run.

"So how long have we got, uh…Ryder for?" I asked Sookie, as she settled him on the cushion and walked around the table to sit opposite us.

"Don't know" Sookie said, watching Ryder as he just about stabbed his hand with a fork. I reached over and took it out of his hand, which just about caused him to wobble off the cushion, so I steadied him as well.

At this rate, I'd be lucky to even get any of the fucking fish sticks.

Ryder tried again, picking up a fish stick with his hand. "Hot!" he cried out. "Hot, hot!"

"Oh" Sookie said, and she took his plate off him, which caused more consternation from Ryder and I had stop him falling off the chair again while he moved around trying to work out what was happening. She cut the fish sticks into segments, blew on them, and handed them back over.

"They're just warm now, Ryder" she said. "But try the peas, they're cooler. There's your spoon."

"No peas" Ryder said.

"You like peas" I told him. I was pretty sure that would still work.

"No peas" he reiterated. OK, maybe it didn't. Still, it wasn't my kid.

"Eat some peas" Sookie urged. "That way you'll grow up big and strong like Uncle Eric." The kid looked at me. I don't think he was that fucking impressed.

By this stage I'd finished my lunch and Sookie wasn't far behind. Ryder was only just starting, and boy, did he drag the fucking thing out. Sookie gave up on the peas and tried to remove the fish sticks twice only for him to cry each time that he wasn't done. I really wanted to tell him to fucking eat faster, but it probably wasn't the thing to do.

"I guess that's only children for you" Sookie mused. "He doesn't have to fight for his food."

"Well, we could get Ivan in here" I suggested.

"No!" Sookie warned. "He doesn't like dogs."

Well, that sounded fucking weird. All small boys liked dogs. It was one of those rules. When Sookie went into the laundry room to get something out of the freezer for dinner, I went to the door and let Ivan in. He was fucking happy to see me; in fact he'd been fucking happy to see me since we got back from the States.

Ryder wasn't fucking happy to see Ivan. "No doggy!" he yelled, and he climbed onto the table, knocking the remaining fish sticks onto the floor. Ivan was thrilled to see Ryder and the shower of fish sticks just made the whole thing better.

Well, fuck it. At least someone was enjoying that lunch.

"So I can't even go into the laundry now?" Sookie asked.

"We're OK" I said, lifting Ryder off the table. He clung to me like a baby monkey. "Nooo!" he wailed.

"It's just Ivan" I said. "See, he eats crap off the floor, not kids."

"That's really comforting" Sookie said, from the side-lines.

"Well…no one's really scared of dogs, Sookie."

"Ryder is."

"Look, you can pat him if you want. He's really quite nice. Ivan, sit!" Ivan sat, probably happy now he'd had all those fish sticks. I crouched down and Ryder tried to crawl onto my head as I did so. "Ivan's not scary" I told him. I don't think he believed me.

"He's just panting because…well, it's what he does. If you scratch behind his ears, he likes that." I demonstrated for Ryder. "See, he has long ears."

"Bunny" Ryder said.

"Well, kind of like a bunny. But he's not really a bunny."

"Bunny" Ryder said again. He seemed a bit slow on the uptake, but he did reach out a hand to Ivan and managed to make contact with Ivan's head. Unfortunately Ivan decided that the lingering fish stick all over Ryder make him entirely lickable.

Ryder shrieked and pulled his hand back. "It's just, um…well. Dog-slobber. It's OK" I assured him.

Ryder attempted to make contact again, and fucking Ivan licked him again, but this time at least, Ryder giggled.

"Yeah, it tickles" I said to him.

"Ickles" he repeated. "Doggie ickles ika poppa. Poppa ickles dun sleepsies onda beg." Yeah, I had no idea what the fuck most of that was. The accent fucking didn't help. Still, he wasn't crying.

I was pretty good at this stuff.

I put Ryder on the floor hoping now that he and Ivan were friends that would be OK and went to make some coffee. "Well at least he's not so scared of dogs now" Sookie said, as she glanced over at him, from where she was wiping down her beloved oven.

"No, so that's something we've achieved" I said. It wasn't exactly like a fucking orgasm, but it would have to do. At least as long as we had Ryder.

Ryder patted Ivan for a while, and then Ivan got bored and I let him back outside, and thought it might be a good idea for Ryder for have some fresh air. "Is he having a nap?" I asked Sookie.

"Yes" she said.

Thank fuck for that, maybe the afternoon wouldn't be a total bust then.

"Yep, you go out and have five minutes on the deck" I said to him, and he looked at me dubiously. "It's not that cold" I assured him. "Just, you know. Run around."

I sat back down at the table with Sookie and the coffee. "I had forgotten what it's like, having such a small kid around" she mused. "I'm kind of used to them being fairly independent these days. Well, Pam was independent from the start, really."

"She was" I agreed. "Most of the time. She had the bigger kids to help her though."

"Yeah, Amelia liked to carry her around like a doll for a while there. Until Pam got a bit bigger and used to scream if anyone touched her."

"We're doing OK though" I said, taking a sip of my coffee. "I don't think we've lost our touch."

"No" Sookie agreed, and then she looked around. "Where is Ryder?"

"Outside. Last run before a nap. I put him on the deck." Yeah, I remembered how this went. They ran, they ate, they ran a bit more, and then they slept. They fucking slept like the dead for at least two hours so I could have Sookie to myself.

Only Sookie looked around in alarm. "Did you shut the gate?" she asked. "To the stairs?"

"Um...no" I said. "But he's fine."

"He's not ours" Sookie pointed out. "So he better be fine." I stood up and went to check on him while Sookie muttered about how she was pretty sure Ryder didn't want the bed next to his great-grandfather.

I looked on the deck, but of course, Ryder wasn't fucking there. Yeah, I didn't think Sookie would be thrilled with the news I lost…well, whatever the fuck relation Ryder was to her, and there was likely to be no sex after that. Ever.

This afternoon wasn't what I fucking hoped it would be.

I considered calling him, but I wasn't sure he'd come to me. Also, it probably wasn't a wise move to let Sookie know he'd wandered off. He wasn't in a heap at the bottom of the stairs down from the deck, so that was a good thing. I just didn't know where he was.

The gate to the driveway was shut? Wasn't it? Fuck.

I walked down the steps to go and check it and discovered that it was indeed shut and also that Ryder was sitting beside the rabbit hutch staring at Felicia's rabbit Bobby. He pointed at Bobby and said "bunny" and then went back to chewing on the carrot he was holding.

Well, at least he was getting some immunity while he was here.

I carried him back inside, which didn't go down well because apparently he liked Bobby and wanted to stay out here in the cold with him. "What's he got there?" Sookie asked when we got back inside the house.

"Um…snack" I said.

"Carrup" Ryder supplied. "Bunny eata da carrup."

"Euw, that's…is that one Bobby was gnawing on?" Sookie asked. I shrugged, I had no fucking clue. But it seemed like a distinct possibility.

"Don't eat that, Ryder" Sookie said, and Ryder ignored both her words and the hand she held out to take it from him, and kept chewing on his prize.

"I guess…well, he's eating a vegetable, that's good, isn't it?" Sookie looked at me.

"Well, I don't think it's going to kill him Sookie. Look at all the shit Tray's eaten over the years." Sookie didn't look convinced, but by this time Ryder had finished the carrot anyway.

"OK, off for a nap, I think" Sookie said. "Um…just not sure where…" She looked around as though a crib might miraculously appear. "I guess our bed" she said in the end.

"Really?" I asked. I had plans for our bed. They didn't include having Ryder in it.

"Well, he can't use any of the kids' beds because if their stuff gets touched we'll never hear the end of it. As it is I have to readjust Pam's bed before she sees it. So I think our bed is best. After all, neither of us are going to complain if the pillows get shifted around, are we?"

Well, not if I was the one shifting them. So we could have sex. But I felt like I'd like to complain about Ryder having my bed.

I didn't though. Instead I helped Sookie change his diaper while she explained that I'd missed the poop from that morning. I didn't really think I'd missed anything at all.

And then I left Sookie to read Ryder that fucking book on diggers and went to…well, I had no fucking clue what to do now. I wondered how Sookie felt about trying sex on the dryer?

In the end I sat on the couch in the family room and switched on the TV. Sookie came in and sat down. And so did Ryder.

"You're having a nap" I told him. Ryder didn't look convinced. Sookie gathered him up and said maybe she'd let him have Mr Fluffy 'just for a little while, in case it helped him sleep'. And then they left again.

Sookie came back. Ryder didn't. That was a start. If we shut the door to the family room, maybe she'd be interested in sex?

Unfortunately she put her head on my shoulder and pretty soon she nodded off. That was nice. For her. She was the only one sleeping. Ryder came back in the room, complete with Mr Fluffy. "No seep" he announced.

"Fine" I said to him. "You can keep me company then."

SPOV

I dozed for about five minutes and woke up to find Ryder back in the room. "Oh. There you are" Eric said.

"What? I just closed my eyes for a moment" I said, hoping Eric didn't notice the drool on his shirt. "Small kids are exhausting!" I said. They were.

Eric snorted. "You had Ryder for how many hours, Sookie?"

"Oh, shut up. I'm old now. So…what are we watching?"

"Um…Animal Planet. Something on predators."

"Really? Is that a good idea?" I asked, and then I leaned past Eric to have a look at Ryder, who was sitting there, still clutching Mr Fluffy. I hoped I could get that back off him. But he seemed fine with the viewing choice, so I wasn't going to argue.

"Look!" I said to Ryder, as I glanced at the screen. "Lions. They're always cool. But not as cool as tigers."

"Oh so much cooler" Eric said.

"Yeah, just because the male lions all stand around and wait for the lionesses to bring dinner home, you think that's the pinnacle of evolution."

"Maybe not the pinnacle, but it seems to work. For them."

"Phfft" I said, not really awake enough to formulate an argument. Eric was only half-watching TV now; having pulled out his phone he was scrolling through something which was far more interesting than TV. I looked at the floor and debated whether I should try and vacuum before the kids got home from school, or worry about it after they'd gone to bed.

Ryder was still watching intently. But then the scene changed. "Bunny!" he said.

"Mmm-hmm" Eric agreed, without actually looking up from the phone. "Bunny."

"Bunny?" Ryder asked.

"There" Eric said, patting Mr Fluffy.

"Bunny!" Ryder yelled, quite loudly, and he pointed to the screen. Too late, Eric and I both looked in time to see an enormous wolf carry off some kind of hare. "Bunny bleedin'!" Ryder yelled.

"Well, I don't think he's exactly worrying about that…" Eric said, but I kicked his leg. He wasn't helpful sometimes.

"It's OK" I said to Ryder, and I moved to the other end of the couch to comfort him. "Bunny gone!" he sobbed. And then he said a whole bunch of stuff I didn't really catch, but I think it was something about the bunny being outside.

"He thinks it was Bobby" I said to Eric, who was looking unconcerned about the whole incident.

"He can't tell the difference between real and TV yet?" Eric asked.

I shrugged as best I could. I didn't know. I didn't even know if he watched much TV, and maybe he'd never seen live-action animal maulings before.

"Probably it wasn't the best choice of program. Like I said." Eric rolled his eyes. "Yeah, now it's my fault."

"Well…you picked the channel" I said to him. "Who else would be to blame?" Eric didn't answer that, he just switched off the television. He was probably trying to work out the culpability of the wolf involved.

"Come on" I said to Ryder. "Let's go outside and see that Bobby the bunny is still OK."

"Bunny" Ryder sobbed.

I picked him up and the three of us went outside where the sun was still out, but the wind was quite chilly and walked around to Bobby's hutch. "See! There he is!" I said, brightly.

"Bunny no'bleedin'?" Ryder asked.

"No" I said. "Look, let's get him out and cuddle him." I looked at Eric, who sighed and opened up the hutch, and picked up Bobby who looked about as annoyed as a rabbit could, because he'd been enjoying his lunch when Eric rudely removed him from it.

"Bunny!" Ryder squealed, and he threw his arms around Bobby.

"I think he likes rabbits" I said to Eric. Eric didn't really have an opinion on that. I moved away from Ryder and Bobby, sensing his opportunity, kicked and squirmed. Ryder dropped him, and then he took off around the corner of the garage.

"Bunny!" Ryder yelled. "Bunny! Co'back!"

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" Eric grumped. "That fucking rabbit."

"Yeah, just watch the language" I warned him, but given he was already annoyed at Bobby I only ended up getting a withering gaze from him before he walked off to find Bobby. "Don't worry" I said to Ryder. "We'll get Bobby back."

I walked in the same direction Eric had and Ryder trotted after me. Eric wasn't difficult to find because he was currently delivering his monologue on why rabbits didn't make good pets. "They're not meant to be pets" he said. "They're meant to be out in a fucking meadow."

"You know we have a rabbit problem in the South Island" I informed him, while trying to see if Bobby was under the hydrangea. "They don't want any rabbits in their meadows. They have to keep…you know…" I didn't want to say what they did to them in front of Ryder. Not after the incident inside.

"Well of course they do" Eric said. "And then you could eat them. I've never had rabbit. But I might, if Bobby keeps fucking around and wandering off."

"We're not eating Felicia's pet! That would be mean."

"Why? She doesn't give a fuck about him most of the time, and I'm stuck out here moving the goddamned hutch around so I can mow the lawn. I think he might be better as a stew."

"I'm not making rabbit stew!" I dropped my voice down to a whisper. "Especially with Bobby."

Eric sighed, and looked around under another bush. "I'm just curious" he said. "About what it tastes like."

"Yeah, and that was all you took away from watching _Downton Abbey_ with me, wasn't it. The fact that you'd never eaten rabbit."

"Or pheasant" Eric said, peering under the fence. God I hoped Bobby hadn't had time to tunnel into next door.

"Right. Or pheasant. Thank God we don't have any pet pheasants. I'm sure there was more to glean from the show than the animals you haven't tasted yet."

"Nope. That was about it, Sookie. It's a fucking pointless show."

"Oh, and all your shows are so riveting."

"At least they're rooted in reality. And not just a way of showing off a bunch of fucking dresses. Oh, fuck. There you are Bobby!" Eric hauled him out of the garden and we walked back to where Ryder was now sobbing.

"It's alright" Eric said. "We have the rabbit back." He shoved Bobby back into his hutch.

"Poor Ryder" I said, picking him up. "Everything's hard when you're tired."

"And maybe his parents don't argue about TV when they're grumpy with each other" Eric added.

"I'm not grumpy" I said to Eric. "You're grumpy." He didn't reply to that.

We went back inside and I put Ryder back in the family room with the cars we'd played with earlier. Eric seemed mildly interested in that game, so I left them to it and went to fold some laundry. I knew it had been a good idea to get Eric to come home, now Ryder had a playmate things were much better. As long as the playmate didn't show him any rabbits being mauled to death again, things were fine.

I thought we might walk up to the school and pick the kids up, so I started getting things ready for that. I located Ryder's jacket, went out to the garage and pulled out the old pushchair and gave it a good brush-off, and then I went back inside to tell everyone we were going. I found them still in the family room, only now Ryder had invented a game where he basically used Eric as a trampoline.

"That looks like fun" I commented.

"I'm pretty sure this is why we had Tray" Eric said, as Ryder landed quite firmly on his stomach. "So I wouldn't have to do too much of this with Sam."

"I'm pretty sure we had Tray because you forgot the condom" I said to him. Which was the truth.

Eric didn't look convinced. "Really, Sookie? I thought we agreed that was a miscommunication."

"Uh-huh, it was. Your brain wasn't communicating with the rest of you. OK, lets go and get ready and go up to school." Eric managed to persuade Ryder to stop jumping and stood up and walked off. Ryder hesitated for about a second and then sprinted after Eric. I could hear Eric say "You really need to come in with me?"

I went to the bedroom to get my jacket and after a while Eric and Ryder emerged from the ensuite. "I'm not sure I really miss having company in the bathroom with me" Eric mused, as he put his shoes on under Ryder's watchful gaze.

"Well, at least I didn't hear him laughing like Felicia used to" I pointed out. "I think she thought you were defective or something, not being, uh, built like the rest of us."

"Yes" Eric said. "Quite."

"OK, so we're ready…ooh, Mr Fluffy" I said, and I dashed out to return him to Pam's room. I straightened up the other pillows and toys and congratulated myself on avoiding disaster. However, when I snuck a glance into Tray and Sam's room, I realised a whole other disaster had happened.

"Eric, look!" I said, as Eric and Ryder appeared in the hallway behind me. "The Lego!" The table that had Tray's Lego creations was now just a pile of what could best be described as Lego rubble.

"Shit" Eric said.

"Language!" I admonished, although God knows why I bothered. "You'll have to rebuild it all" I said to him.

"Why me?" Eric asked.

"Well, I can't. I can't tell an X-Wing from a Y-Wing let alone what pieces you'd use to make one."

Eric looked panicked and I got the impression he probably couldn't either. "Tray won't really mind…" he started to say, but I cut him off. "Remember the last time Sam touched it? And that was just touching?"

"Oh…fuck" Eric said, "I'll just do what I can." I took Ryder, who'd been watching us during this exchange, outside and we admired the front garden for a bit, and then we really had to get going if we were going to be at school on time, and I yelled for Eric who said he'd catch up. So with Ryder in the pushchair, which was still set up as a double one, and a panting Ivan attached to the handle of it, I set off.

I'd forgotten how hard it was pushing the thing up hills, and especially when Ivan tried to pull you in a different direction. And that was with only one kid in the pushchair, how had I ever managed with two?

So it wasn't too long before Eric caught up to us. "All done?" I said to him, panting slightly. I was sure I was fitter than this.

"Mmm" Eric said. "I did what I could…fuck, those pieces are tiny. And it's all just…well. Hopefully Tray won't be too mad."

OK, well we could hope. Tray was easy-going about most things, with the notable exception of the Lego table. I just hoped he didn't remember where I'd hidden his rubber-band gun when he did get mad.

Eric took over pushing, which was somewhat of a relief, although mostly we were on the downhill part of the walk to school now. Ryder had nodded off in the pushchair, and Ivan was panting and enjoying the scenery. It was kind of nice to be doing this again, but I maybe wouldn't want to do it every day. It was just so much easier to walk to school without pushing a huge piece of equipment and someone else.

As we got inside the school gates we could see Tray coming towards us from his classroom. He wasn't, I noted, wearing any shoes. I guess that was to be expected. I hoped he remembered where he'd left them this time. He was carrying the large paper bin from his classroom on his way to empty it into the recycling bin, which was one of the jobs the kids all queued up to do at the end of the day.

"Hi Tray!" I called out to him, and he looked up and squinted at us suspiciously. "What're you doing here?" he asked.

"We've come to get you all" I said to him, and he walked over. "It's nearly home time."

"It is?" Tray asked, looking genuinely surprised. "Sweet!" He bent down and patted Ivan who'd been straining at the leash to get to Tray, and then he walked off carrying his bin.

"So…if he didn't think it was home time, why did he think he was on rubbish-duty?" I asked Eric, but Eric just shrugged. "Best not to think about it, Sookie. Let's just hope it works in our favour when we get home."

Yeah, there was still the Lego. Maybe he wouldn't notice?

We got to Pam's classroom, where she spied Eric through the window and held up a picture and did a long and complicated discussion about it through the glass. I couldn't hear her. Eric nodded a bit, but I didn't think he could either. He was just good at pretending. Eventually Pam had to sit down and Eric got bailed up by one of the other mothers who wanted to talk to him. Ivan snuffled around looking for dropped food. I sat on a bench and looked at Ryder who, now we weren't moving, woke up and looked around. He looked a bit worried.

"It's school" I said to him. "We have to get the big kids."

"Is he yours too?" one of the mothers whose name, or kid, I didn't know, asked me. I had to admit that over the years I'd gotten a bit lazier and didn't bother so much about figuring out who all the other parents were. This wasn't my first go-around after all.

"No. No, five was enough" I said, and the woman gave me a funny look. OK, well maybe for most people five is way too many, but I did know when to stop because six would just be stupid.

The bell rang and Pam came sprinting out of the classroom with her bag on her back and started talking a mile a minute. "We went to the library and I got two new books and we read stories in there. And Alfie Pearce pulled my pony-tail and it really hurt! I thought he was going to pull my hair right off!"

"What did you do?" I asked her, while checking that she had everything she was supposed to in her bag.

"I punched him. In the nuts" Pam said. "He cried. A lot."

"Oh, Pam" I said. "I don't know if that's very nice…" but Eric spoke over me. "Did the teacher notice?" he asked.

"Nope" Pam said. I waited for Eric to say something else, but he didn't. He just nodded. OK, so I guess we were condoning _that_ then.

Tray came running over and threw his school bag at me. "Watch this!" he yelled, and then he took off. I didn't even get a chance to tell him to come back. I checked he had everything in there; lunchbox, book bag, jacket, shoes. Nope. No shoes. We'd have to look for them.

Sam sauntered over. "Oh" he said to Eric. "It's not just Mum."

"No" Eric said.

"How come?"

"Finished early."

"Why?"

"Really, Sam? You need to know everything I do?" Sam just shrugged. I supposed he was curious. "You'll be pleased to know I got the tickets" Eric said to him, and that made Sam look a bit happier. The planning for Sam's birthday, which also counted as Eric's birthday, was in full swing. In addition to the party which was being held at an indoor rock-climbing venue, to be followed by a family dinner at Sam's favourite restaurant, Lonestar in Newmarket, he was going to see a New Zealand Breakers basketball game with Eric.

I had tried not to feel too bad about the fact that even Sam had picked Eric over me this time, and I'd done a better job of covering it up than Tray, who was quite miffed at being left out. So miffed that Sam had wavered and considered including him until Eric had offered him his own birthday outing in a couple of months' time.

Tray hadn't known what to choose until I mentioned the stock car races at Waikaraka Park. I'd been to a few in my teens and the demolition derby would be right up Tray's alley, I thought. I'd enjoyed about four minutes of coolness in Tray's eyes when I'd confessed to having gone there, and then he'd switched allegiance back to Eric as soon as Eric agreed to take him.

"Where's Tray?" Sam asked, looking around.

"I don't know, but we'd better go and find him" I said, and Eric put his hands on the pushchair handle in preparation to head off, and then Pam finally noticed the pushchair. And its occupant.

"Who's that?" she said, pointing a finger at poor Ryder, who shrank back in fear.

"Ryder" I said. "You remember? It's Hunter's son. From the wedding."

"Why is he here? And why is he in my pushchair?"

"We're babysitting" Eric said. "And you don't need a stroller, Pam."

"But it's mine!" Pam wailed, and I was really glad that we had pried Mr Fluffy out of Ryder's grasp.

"I don't think it was yours first" Sam said, but that didn't appease Pam.

"Mine!" she hissed. "You can't give away my things. _I'm_ the littlest and it's my…" she trailed off as two other little girls appeared beside her. Two almost identical little girls, with jet black hair in swishy ponytails, and multi-colour manicures.

Venetia and Florentine, or the decidedly less fancy Netty and Flo as they were to their mum, had recently arrived at the school when their Kiwi parents had moved back from London for the children's education. They hadn't quite eclipsed Miriam in Pam's affections, but she was desperate to be part of their inner circle. They kind of gave me the creeps, but I didn't want to say that to Pam. After all, we'd survived Amelia's entanglement with Yvetta, I was sure we could survive this.

"Who's this?" one of them asked Pam. Don't ask me which one.

"Oh, this is my…um, sort of my cousin?" Pam looked at me, and I nodded. "Ryder."

"Oh he's sooo cute!" the little girl squealed, in a terribly high-pitched and false voice. Her twin seemed to concur, and they reached out simultaneously to tickle Ryder under the chin like he was a cat. I wasn't sure what he found more terrifying, Pam's utter dislike of him, or the twins' apparent desire to pet him to death.

"What chubby cheeks he has!" one of them said, and I could guess that was something she'd heard her mum say at some point. I didn't think five year old girls spontaneously came up with that kind of statement.

"He's very cute. And he's staying with me. In my room" Pam announced. Luckily Ryder couldn't contradict her, and I didn't have the heart to.

Poor Ryder couldn't cope with the attention, and burst into tears. "I think you'd better leave him alone" Pam said, importantly. "He's just a baby. Aren't you just a little, tiny baby?" Ryder didn't seem consoled by that, but Pam was enjoying her big moment of having someone younger than her to show off.

Well, all the other kids had had a chance to do it at some point. I guessed it was only fair.

Venetia and Florentine left, after much hugging of Pam and whispering secrets in her ear, and then Tray came running over. "Oh" he said. "You're still here."

"Well, we're not going to leave without you" Eric said, and Tray shrugged.

"Where are your shoes?" I asked him, and Tray looked thoughtful.

"Um…dunno. Did I have shoes?"

"We have to wear shoes!" Pam pointed out.

"Pam's right" I said. "There would have been shoes this morning."

We all trooped to Tray's classroom and checked in the box of left clothing inside the room and around the area outside where cubbyholes were. No shoes. "Any thoughts on the matter, Tray?" Eric asked, clearly bored by the whole thing now.

Tray stood with his hands on his hips, and looked around. "I think someone took them" he said.

"Who?" Eric challenged.

"Well, I don't know" Tray said, his tone making it clear that he thought that whatever had happened to his shoes, it wasn't his fault. "If we knew that, we could get them. But I don't."

"I'm not buying you new shoes because you lost those ones" Eric said to him.

"Well, just buy Sam new shoes, and I'll have his" Tray said.

"Fuck off!" Sam said to him. Tray shrugged. He'd tried. He was over looking for shoes too.

"Did you take them off at lunchtime?" I asked him.

"Maybe" Tray conceded.

"Where did you play?" I prompted.

"Um…field?" Tray said, not sounding very sure. He looked at Sam. Sam nodded.

"I'm bored!" Pam announced. "And I'm hungry. And I want to go in the pushchair!" Now that the twins weren't around, she felt free to revert to her earlier desire to be the undisputed baby of the family.

"No you don't Pam" Eric said. "Look, why don't we take Ryder to the playground and we'll leave Mum and Tray to look for his shoes.

"OK" I said, glad that I got all the really fun jobs.

We eventually found Tray's shoes discarded under the trees on the far side of the field. "You really need to start keeping a track of these things" I said to Tray and he shrugged. I kind of got his point, why did he need to when he had me to do it? Eric tended to have the same attitude at times, he'd spent years asking me where he'd put his phone and his keys.

We got to the playground for the juniors and found Sam and Pam watching Eric wrangle a red-faced, bawling Ryder. "What happened?" I asked.

"Um…well…" Sam said.

"He fell off the bridge" Pam said. "He went under the rope handle."

"It's a fucking poor design" Eric said, probably trying to cover up the guilt he clearly felt for not catching that one.

"Well, it is designed for bigger kids" I said.

"M'knee!" Ryder wailed. "Knee sore!"

I pulled up his tracksuit pants and sure enough he had a beautiful scrape on his knee. "Oooh. Ouch" I said to commiserate.

"There's not much blood. You're fine" Eric told him. Ryder didn't buy it. Eric looked confused and tried to hand him to me. "There you go; Aunty Sookie will make it all better."

"I will?" I asked him.

"Yeah…uh, Aunty Sookie has magic kisses" Eric announced. Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that one, it had been a long time since I'd had to use it. But I'd give anything a go if it would stop Ryder making that horrible noise.

"I do" I agreed. Ryder eyed me suspiciously. "Here. I'll show you." I bent my head and kissed his knee. "See? All better."

Ryder sniffed loudly. "Not hurtin'?" he asked.

"No" I said. "Not anymore."

"Still bleedin'" Ryder said.

"You're fine" Eric told him. I kissed it again. That seemed to work.

We put Ryder back in the pushchair and Eric reiterated to Pam that she couldn't get in it, and we set off for home, the boys leading most of the way as they chased each other and Pam in circles around us. About half-way home, Sam lunged for Tray and they crashed to the footpath, leaving Tray with an even more impressive skinned knee than Ryder's.

However, he pre-empted Eric. "I'm fine!" he yelled, picking himself up.

"Nah. You're bleeding" Sam said to him, grinning. "You probably need a magic kiss too."

"No I don't!" Tray almost screamed. "I'm fine! Aren't I, Dad?"

"What?" Eric asked. He glanced at Tray's knee. "Oh. Yeah. Fine."

Well, I'd been magic for about ten minutes that had to be something.

Ryder watched the big kids with a wary expression, which continued on when we got home. Pam decided he might make a nice pet and took him off to her room where I could hear her loudly telling him what to do. "No! Ryder you have to sit there. Don't touch Mr Fluffy. Cuddle that bear, Ryder. The bear! Not Mr Fluffy! That's mine! That's it, Ryder. Good boy, Ryder. You're so cute."

Yeah, she'd learnt a thing or two from her big sisters. When they turned up Ryder really didn't know what to make of them. They were almost adult-sized, but quite clearly weren't adults. Well, it was clear to me.

"Did you know Amelia's been writing _poetry?_" Felicia asked me, in the same voice she might have asked me if I'd known that Amelia had been selling her kidneys on the black market.

"Well, that's OK" I said. At least it was almost like homework. As it was Friday afternoon everyone had decided to pretend there was no such thing. Which meant this time Sunday would be interesting.

"I think this one is about Riley. That's just weird" Felicia said, waving a notebook in front of me.

"GIVE ME BACK MY JOURNAL!" Amelia roared, as she burst into the kitchen.

"Nuh-uh" Felicia said, just as Ryder came in. He must have finally tired of Pam bossing him around. He didn't look that thrilled at stumbling across Amelia and Felicia's fight though.

"You have to give it to me! It's not yours! You can't take stuff that isn't yours!" Amelia said.

"But you left it in the hall" Felicia countered.

"In my bag!"

"Your school bag needs to be put away, Amelia" I suggested, but they ignored me. Eric walked in.

"Whose book is that?" he asked, pointing to the journal Felicia was holding above her head. "Mine!" Amelia yelled, swiping for it and missing.

"Hand it over" Eric said, mildly and Felicia complied. "Lame-o weirdy-pants" she whispered to Amelia.

"Thieving little tart" Amelia hissed.

Eric ignored the both of them, and they drifted off. But then we heard Tray. "What the _fuck_ happened?" he roared, and Eric actually looked up at the sound of that. Ryder crept close to my legs.

Tray stomped in. "Who touched my Lego?" he asked.

"Um…Ryder" Eric said, pointing at poor Ryder who looked terrified. I hoped it didn't make him poo himself. I would no doubt still be on nappy duty.

"Really? He did that?" Tray asked.

"Well, yeah" Eric said. "It's bound to happen. You remember Pamzilla." Yeah, we all remembered Pamzilla. Any game the boys played, Pam was in the middle of it knocking it all over to their cries of horror.

"But he did OK, didn't he? For just a little guy?" Tray asked.

"Um…" Eric said, clearly not sure where this was going.

"Yeah, 'cos I wouldn't have been able to build it like that when I was little, eh? I mean I took it all apart this morning 'cos I had a plan, but he's been building, like, fighters and stuff all day. So that's pretty sweet. He's not bad for a baby."

"Oh" Eric said. "Yeah." I guess we were just going to go with that one while it was calm.

Tray walked into the pantry and back out again. "What's for dinner?" he asked.

"Hamburgers" I informed him.

"Awesome!" Tray said enthusiastically.

"Homemade hamburgers" I added, and Tray looked less enthusiastic. "Well, if you really want them" he said, in a voice which suggested he didn't really want them.

"Be grateful you're getting fed, and don't eat too many snacks" Eric informed him, before he left too.

I busied myself with dinner. "Hey, look Mum!" Tray said after a few minutes. "Ryder really likes me!"

"That's because you're feeding him biscuits" I said to Tray. "Oh, whatever. It worked for Dad."

"What?" Tray asked, and he went back to talking to Ryder. I guessed he wasn't used to younger kids who thought he was cool. Pam had always thought he was kind of fun to annoy but mostly he was just defined as not-Eric and therefore not that interesting.

By the time dinner was ready I was starting to worry that Aunty Linda had maybe taken off to Rarotonga as well. I cleaned the remaining biscuit off of Ryder and sat him on our one spare chair next to Eric. He stared around the table at the bigger kids who were all fighting and shovelling food in as fast as they could.

"Are we keeping Ryder now?" Pam asked. "Because he doesn't have a bedroom and I'm not sharing mine."

"I have to share mine" Sam grumbled.

"Well…you're a boy" Pam informed him. "You could share with Ryder too."

"He can have my bed" Tray offered.

"And where will you sleep?" Eric asked.

"It's OK" Tray said. "I'm not tired. I'll just sit in the family room."

"You're not watching that movie, Tray" Eric said, and Tray sighed noisily. Ryder dropped a chip on the floor and tried to lunge for it, but Eric caught him before he fell off the chair. Ivan swooped in and got it anyway.

I gave up all pretence of trying to get Ryder to eat a good dinner and let him fill up on ice cream afterwards. He wasn't mine, after all. And at some point he was going home. I hoped.

I was about to ring Aunty Linda when she rang me. "I'm about ten minutes away" Aunty Linda said.

"Oh good, because Ryder's getting a bit tired."

"OK, well, just…what's your address, love?"

Sure enough about a half hour later, after Pam had finally been persuaded to go and have a bath and told that we weren't going to make her share it with Ryder, and we'd allowed her to take Mr Fluffy into the bathroom with her so that Ryder couldn't get to him, Aunty Linda finally turned up and I could hand my charge back over.

"So, no trouble was it, love?" she asked. "He's a good boy."

"He is" I agreed. Although I still felt exhausted. Who knew one toddler would make that much difference?

"But easy for you" Aunty Linda informed me. "What's one more, eh?" Well, it seemed to be quite a lot, and really did reinforce the decision about the vasectomy. Five was handful; six would be a nervous breakdown I felt.

Ryder snuggled into Aunty Linda's arms, happy, I think, to leave the chaos behind and go back to his Nana. "Oh, but I have news!" Aunty Linda said. "I spoke to Hads, to let her know about Trev, and she said Tony proposed! They're engaged!" I bit back the urge to say 'really?' and went with the more conventional "Oh, that's wonderful!"

"Isn't it? Although I have to say, he bloody took his time about it. I mean, how long have they been together now?"

"I know" I said. "It's been a long time coming." It never ceased to amaze me how I turned into my mother while talking to Aunty Linda. Not for the first time it occurred to me what intense pleasure she would have taken from the knowledge that I'd managed to have all my children within wedlock. She would have been lording that over Aunty Linda for years now.

"It has, but now we have another wedding to plan! Although I don't think it's exactly going to be like Hunter and Jenny's. And I hope she isn't going to wear white." Well, Mum and Aunty Linda would have agreed on that point.

I said goodbye to Aunty Linda, and told a very tired Ryder he could come back again and play. Eric passed by to say goodbye too and got a much tighter hug from Ryder than I did. I tried not to hold it against him.

I failed. I'd done the nappies for goodness' sake. That had to earn me some points.

But it had never worked that way with my own kids. They never noticed the boring stuff, only the people who played with them and hung out and did cool stuff. Even if they ended up falling off playgrounds in the process.

When Aunty Linda and Ryder left, there suddenly seemed to be a load off my mind. Sure, I had my own kids that I was nominally responsible for, but they could basically take care of themselves. And if they didn't, they'd probably believe Eric when he told them they were fine.

So as time-consuming as the nightly routine was, it was fairly breezy. Even when Sam had a last-minute panic about whether he'd left his soccer boots in Eric's car and they weren't going to be clean for the morning at 10 o'clock I dealt with it, because I was good at that stuff.

I wasn't so good at the toddler stuff anymore. And, more importantly, I didn't want to be. It was like doing your time in the low-grade jobs so eventually you'd get something more interesting.

Although I'm not sure fourteen year old girls writing lovesick poetry counted as necessarily more interesting, but it was maybe better than dirty nappies.

When all the kids were dealt with I found Eric stretched out on our bed. "I'm really, really tired" I said to him, as I flopped down on the other side.

"Yeah" Eric said. "So much for an afternoon off work."

"I know. I bet you missed your nice, quiet office."

"I missed you" Eric said. "Want to come over here and not make a baby with me?"

"You know, I really think I do" I said, sliding myself over to Eric. "If you're feeling up to it?"

"I am" Eric said. "And if I don't, well, there are always your magic kisses."

"Yeah…I still don't think that was part of the aftercare instructions, Eric."

"It really was, Sookie. They've proven it. I'll show you the article if you like."

"No, it's fine" I said, giving him a kiss. "I'll believe you, thousands wouldn't."

"Good thing I didn't marry one of them then" Eric said, grinning at me.

"Very good thing." I agreed.

**A/N Waikaraka (why-car-rack-ah) park is the home of the speedway where they hold stock car races, and the odd demolition derby) in Auckland.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	48. Chapter 48

**A/N So sometimes when the toddler talks to my husband and I, it's pretty clear she thinks we're a bit stupid, or foreign, or maybe both. For instance in the middle of dinner she'll suddenly announce "I want a shocalate bunny." To which, of course, we say "No." Then she'll smile and say "I _want_ a shocalate bunny." And when she hears no again, she just keeps going. "I... WANT... A... SHOCALATE... BUNNY!" Each time she just gets slower and louder and enunciates more clearly, in the hope that it's a language barrier that's causing the confusion. Clearly, it's hard work being two and finding the rest of the world doesn't really get you.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

It was still cold in October when it was supposed to be Spring. I knew it was meant to be Spring, so why didn't the bloody weather?

_Do I need to take blankets?_ I texted to Tara.

_No. Blankets there. Only need boobs_ was the reply I got. That made no sense. Unless Tara really was trying to make me sign up to lesbianism and run away with her.

_Boobs? _ I sent back.

_Crappy auto spell wotsit. Booze. Bring booze!_ _C U Soon_ Tara texted back. OK, that sounded better. That I could do.

Hopefully Tara's plan wasn't to get me drunk and take advantage of me, but I could worry about that when we got to Piha. She'd convinced me that we needed a girl's weekend away, which just meant she wanted to drink wine and bitch about JB.

But she'd convinced me to do worse things in my time, so I wasn't too upset about this one. Although I had to admit to a wee twinge of jealousy at the fact that she was leaving behind two kids in their late teens who were pretty capable of looking after themselves for the whole weekend, even if JB shirked his responsibilities entirely.

I, on the other hand, had faced some long and exhausting preparations in order to be able to leave this morning. I had had to make sure that dinner for tonight was in the slow cooker, and then, make sure that I laid all the packets of two minute rice on the kitchen bench next to it, so that Eric could find the sides to go with the Moroccan apricot lamb I'd made. I'd debated about leaving a map to the frozen peas, but I'd be kidding myself on that one. Instead I added some carrot and capsicum to the stew and hoped for the best.

I'd checked Sam's cricket gear for Saturday morning and I'd put the invitation for the birthday party he was invited to on Sunday morning in the middle of the fridge, and added to my list of instructions where Eric could find the (already wrapped) present.

I'd also listed the fact that Felicia was going to Caitlin's on Sunday morning, that Tray really needed to hurry up and finish that project on Pompeii so I wasn't going to be sitting doing it at 10pm Sunday night after I got back, that Pam wanted to go to Spotlight and buy new craft supplies, and that Amelia and Riley were going to the movies on Saturday night, and that if they ran out of snacks there was banana cake in the freezer and Pam knew where the packet of pre-made icing was.

The beds had clean sheets, and there were clean pyjamas laid out on all the pillowcases. The vacuuming had been done at 10pm the previous night while Eric fretted that I was never going to come to bed and I now wondered why I'd bothered anyway because the floor, and the kitchen floor in particular, looked pretty bad again.

Everyone had gone off to school happy, and I had let myself off doing school lunches by ordering them online from the place that delivered them direct to school. I'd reminded them all about it this morning, and then told Sam he'd probably have to take Tray's to him after collecting them from the school office. Although chances were when Tray discovered his lunchbox was light on food he'd go looking for Sam anyway.

I think I'd covered everything. I hoped I'd covered everything. The short note I'd started out writing had ended up kind of long by the end of it and Eric wasn't good with anything that went past three bullet points.

In desperation I stuck a post-it to the front of my note. 'Feed kids' I wrote. 'Do occasional headcount'. I tried to think of what else might be important. 'Remember I'll be back on Sunday' I wrote and then I left it at that. Most stuff could wait, after all. It was only a couple of nights.

I skipped off to check our wine supply and decide what I was going to take. I could take the gin too, maybe. This could be fun.

EPOV

This weekend was not going to be fun. This weekend was going to be like war, with me left holding it all together until Sookie got back.

Sure, I wasn't so much of an ass as to say that to Sookie herself. I wished her luck and left for work, while she reminded me that I needed to be home no later than 3.15pm to meet the three youngest as they got off the walking bus.

That didn't seem so bad. Maybe if I just broke the weekend down into individual tasks it would be OK. I was pretty fucking sure I could do one thing at a time and nothing bad would happen.

Except that I couldn't. I couldn't do one thing at once because someone else needed me, and that someone else was a client and they were paying for my time. So the fact that the meeting ran late and they wanted to keep talking and then they wanted to show me some work they'd been doing was just something I had to roll with, and then I'd charge them later.

The kids didn't see it that way though. They were gathered on the front steps when I pulled into the driveway. "You weren't here!" Pam announced, as I opened the car door.

"No" I said. "Sorry. I got held up."

"Mum doesn't get held up" Sam grumbled.

"I had to work" I pointed out. I realised that Sookie's Fridays weren't exactly vacation days…but fuck. Today was. For her. She was at Piha. With Tara. And I was here. Being glared at by Sam.

"I'm sooo hungry!" Tray whined, as I walked up the steps to the porch. I opened the door and let the kids go in first, which was a fucking mistake because they promptly dropped a big pile of jackets, schoolbags and shoes right in my way and I pretty much couldn't get in the door.

"Pick up your stuff!" I yelled, but they clearly didn't hear me. Or they were pretending they hadn't anyway. I stepped over everything they'd left and tried to get to the bedroom so I could get changed, and put my own belongings where they fucking belonged.

I didn't get far.

"Dad!" Tray said, as he came around a corner of the hall and almost collided with me. "What can we eat?"

"I don't care" I said. "Just don't eat too much crap and spoil your dinner."

"But…but…you don't have anything?"

"No. Do I look like I'm carrying food? You got lunch, what more do you want." I started walking in the direction of the bedroom again, but Tray didn't take the hint and he followed me.

"Yeah" he agreed. "We got lunch from the office. It was pretty sweet, although there was a lot of lettuce in the roll so I didn't eat that. I was pretty chuffed though when Sam told me he had my lunch, 'cos I'd looked at my lunchbox and thought Mum was angry at me."

"You thought Sookie was angry at you?" I put down my bag. Neatly, beside the bed, and took off my tie and my shoes. I put those away and felt a bit wistful when I noticed there were fewer shoes in Sookie's jumbled pile at the end of the bed.

"Yeah. 'Cos there was no food in there. But she wasn't angry; she just hadn't told me the other people were doing my lunch."

"I'm pretty sure she's never not fed you because she's angry, Tray. And I'm also pretty sure she told you she'd ordered your lunch."

"Nah" he said, sounding adamant. "She didn't. She told Sam. I dunno why he's the only one she tells." He shrugged, as if he couldn't make head or tail of the way it worked.

"It wouldn't be because you don't listen to her?" I asked him, as I swapped my shirt and suit pants for a t-shirt and track pants. I seemed to be missing the t-shirt I'd been wearing the day before though. I was going to put that on again, but it had gone from the closet where I'd left it folded up. I'd have to look for that later on.

"I listen" Tray said. "About important stuff. So what can we eat?"

Yeah, he listened my ass. "I don't know" I said. "You guys can be in charge of that."

"Sweet!" Tray said, and then he looked a little forlorn. "But normally Mum tells us. Or she has something good. Like, last week, she'd bought sushi. Have you got any sushi?"

"Nope" I said to him, and his face fell further. He sighed noisily. "It's not easy being in charge" he said, and he turned and walked out of the room.

"Tell me about it" I said to him, as I followed.

However when we got to the kitchen, we discovered that actually, Sam was in charge. "One biscuit!" he said to Pam. "One biscuit and then have some fruit."

"I don't want fruit!" Pam yelled at him. "I want a fruit roll-up!"

"But they're sugary!" Sam yelled at her. "Your teeth will rot!"

They realised I was there and both stopped facing off to look at me. They had it under control. "I'll be in my office" I said to them, and I walked off to set up my laptop. The trouble with the meeting I'd been in running late and then the fact I'd had to come straight home was that I needed to send some emails.

Sending emails is not easy with constant interruptions.

"Daddy" Pam said in her nicest voice, as she slithered around the door and came running over to my chair. "Daddy, Sam's being bossy, but he's not the boss of me, is he?"

"No" I said, trying to think of a nice way to word 'your plan is a fucking disaster'. Maybe if I just left out the word fucking, that would do?

"So I can have a fruit roll-up, can't I Daddy?" Pam said, as she tried desperately to hug my arm. I actually needed that arm to type so it wasn't really helpful.

"No" I repeated. Maybe calling it a disaster was too strong? Was 'doomed to failure' better, or worse? Fuck, this is where Sookie was useful. Sometimes if I asked her opinion it helped because I found out the way I heard it in my head was totally fucking different to the way other people did when they read the stuff I wrote.

Maybe I should say something like 'a significant risk'. That sounded better, didn't it?

Pam, however, was pouting now, while still trying to hug my arm. "It's just one little roll-up" she said. "One won't hurt and it's not like I've eaten four biscuits. Tray's had four biscuits and Sam let him. Sam's just being mean to me. I don't think that's fair, Daddy!"

"No" I said for a third time.

"So I can have a roll-up?"

"No" I said again, wondering why this was so difficult for Pam. Although maybe she was on to something. Maybe if my email just said 'No!' they'd get the fucking message that I thought their idea was shit and I didn't care if they paid me, I didn't want to be involved with something so mind-blowingly and stupendously stupid.

Why did I have to deal with fucking idiots?

Because they fucking paid me, that was why.

My life sucked.

"Daddy!" Pam squealed. "You're not even listening!"

"No" I said, once again.

"I'm going to have a fruit roll-up" Pam said. "And you can't stop me!" And then she flounced off. I was still a bit vague on what a fruit roll-up actually was, but I was counting on Sam to fight that battle for me. Or not. Maybe it wasn't as big as deal as the kids were making it out to be.

Maybe they'd all kill each other over it and this weekend would suddenly get a lot easier.

Maybe I should write 'I have some doubts about the viability of the proposal, and would welcome the opportunity to discuss it further.' That way, at least I'd get to charge them for more hours.

"You can't stop me!" Pam's voice roared from the other end of the house. "Daddy said!"

Yep, my life definitely sucked.

SPOV

This was pretty good, this whole going away for the weekend thing. Well, so far it had only been a few hours since Tara picked me up from home, but I was enjoying myself doing absolutely nothing. Well, not nothing. I was sitting on the deck of the re-built bach at Piha and drinking wine and eating potato chips and talking to Tara.

So that was something. And I was enjoying it.

"You know what I miss about home? Right at this point in time?" Tara asked me. I shrugged, and grabbed more chips. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had this much access to potato chips. Normally there'd be at least four other small hands and quite often one big one shoved in the bag instead.

My chips, all mine.

Was it a bad sign I was going all Gollum-y over potato chips?

"Nothing!" Tara said emphatically. Good, she hadn't really wanted a response then. And God knows, it was hard to talk with your mouth full of chips. Not without spraying chip crumbs everywhere. I'd seen Tray do it many times. It wasn't pleasant.

"If I was at home, I'd have to make dinner because JB would be fussing if we had takeaways again. But here, here I don't have to" Tara said.

I considered whether I should point out that making dinner for four people who were all basically adults was nothing compared to the chaos there'd be at my house about now, but I though sod it, and I ate more chips instead.

Who knew potato chip bags actually came with this many chips in them?

"Do you think we should microwave our dinners before, or after, we open the next bottle of wine?" Tara asked me, as she ate some chips out of her own bag.

"Don't care" I said. "I'm just enjoying having Supermarket Surprise for dinner myself, for once."

"You know, I don't think JB could even find that section of the supermarket, let alone organise frozen dinners for the kids" Tara mused. "You're very lucky with Eric."

"Mmm" I said. Well, I was. Mostly. Still, it was kind of awesome here.

"Let's have more wine and work up to dinner" Tara suggested. I had to admit, that sounded like a good plan.

EPOV

Felicia arrived home and she stood outside the door to my office and yelled "Why is everyone's crap in the doorway?" It wasn't my fucking crap so I couldn't answer her. There was the sound of bags sliding as she kicked a path through, then a thud as, I assume, her own bag hit the floor.

I guess she was going with the idea that if you can't beat them, you just join them.

And then, after a while, Felicia arrived in the office with me. Unlike Pam, she didn't want to cuddle my arm. Mainly because she was eating chips.

"Are those my chips?" I asked her.

"There's nothing else. The boys ate it all, and there's a huge mess in the pantry. And do you know what they're doing now?"

No, but the house was quiet so I'd made an executive decision that I didn't want to know. I hoped Felicia was going to respect that.

Felicia stood there and when I didn't answer, she turned around and started to walk out. "Aren't you going to offer me any?" I asked, but she'd already left, taking the potato chips, my potato chips, with her. I heard Tray in the hallway say "Are those Dad's chips?", and then Felicia said a muffled yes, and Tray demanded "Give me some then", and I realised I wasn't getting any chips.

But at least I was alone in the office again.

Not for long though. "Dad" Tray said, as he walked in. Pieces of chewed chip sprayed out of his mouth. That was gross. "Dad, have you got a jar?"

"Why do you want a jar?" I asked him.

"I…" Tray paused, and looked thoughtful. Then, I assume, he realised he might have been about to give the game away. "Have you got one?" he asked.

"I might" I said. "What's it for?"

"Where?"

"I need to know how big a jar you need, Tray" I said.

Tray sighed and looked at the floor. "Wetas" he said. "So I don't need a very big jar…"

"What do you need wetas for?" I asked, somewhat suspiciously. I hoped like fuck this wasn't another misguided attempt to imitate _Man vs. Wild_ in the backyard. I wasn't entirely certain whether it was the open fire they had tried to light, or the fact they thought they could roast a blackbird that Stan the cat had killed over the fire, which had made Sookie more upset at the time, but I didn't need any of that shit happening on my watch.

"IwanttoputtheminPam'sbed" Tray said in a rush.

"Pardon?"

"Pam. She doesn't like wetas. I want to put them in her bed."

"So Stan can catch them and redistribute them around the house? No, Tray." Tray kept standing there. "But…so…what about the jar?"

"I don't have a jar" I said. "So no wetas."

Tray sighed in the way all the kids did when they thought I was no fucking fun, and stomped off.

"Are you making dinner?" Sam asked next, when he put his head into the office.

"It's in the slow cooker" I informed him. I remembered that part, although no doubt there'd be a list somewhere in the kitchen with about four hundred bullet points most of which would tell me what we could eat. I didn't need to know what we could eat, because, from the reports I was getting about the state of the kitchen, the kids had already fucking eaten it all.

Shit, I hoped dinner was still in the slow cooker.

"I don't think that's all of it" Sam muttered, and then he left. Hopefully he was going to steer Tray away from wherever they'd found the wetas.

I carried on working, trying to get the emails I needed to finish written up and sent out so I could relax over the weekend. Well, not relax. More like give the kids my full attention.

Or at least just fucking be around to clean up the messes they were making.

I heard Amelia arrive home, and there was a bit of muttering over the bags in the doorway and a lot of loud talking. I should have paid more attention to the loud talking, but I was conscious that it was getting closer and closer to dinner time and I was going to have to leave what I was doing and I was concentrating mainly on getting it finished.

So when I got to the kitchen and found not just Amelia, but two extra girls sitting in the kitchen, it was a bit of a shock.

"Why is Chloe crying?" I asked Amelia, who looked up from where she was sitting at the table, consoling Chloe, who had her head on her arms so all I could see was her black hair.

"What?" Amelia asked.

"I'm not crying" a girl with pink hair sitting on the other side of the table said.

Fuck. I was lost. I wondered if there was something on the note Sookie had left that would cover this situation. I suspected I was shit out of luck.

I considered telling them it was dinner time and they'd all have to fuck off out of our house. And then it got worse.

Amelia sighed. "You know Yvetta" she said to me, gesturing to the girl face-down on the table. "She was upset." Amelia bit her lip and looked pretty upset herself.

"Her boyfriend dumped her" Chloe said, sounding less upset than Amelia. I got the feeling she was more of an interested bystander than a person with a vested interest in all of this.

Yvetta, if that's who the fuck it actually was because how the fuck could you tell if everyone changed their hair colour every five minutes, mumbled something like "I can't go home now!" into her arms, and sniffed loudly.

Well, she fucking could. She couldn't stay here.

Amelia gave Yvetta a worried look. "It's her mum" she whispered.

"What?" I asked.

"Her mum" Amelia said, slightly louder.

"What about her mother?" I asked. Maybe her mother was coming soon and this would all be over.

"Her mother slept with her boyfriend" Chloe clarified. I wished she fucking hadn't. "Well, ex-boyfriend" Chloe amended. She shrugged. I suppose that wasn't going to be a problem for her.

I wasn't sure it was my problem either.

Felicia burst into the room and took in the scene. "You're all mental!" she said, and then she turned to me. "Have we got any painkillers?" she asked.

"Yeah" I said, still perplexed at the situation that had taken over the kitchen table. And wasn't leaving any fucking time soon. Amelia was now handing Yvetta tissues and rubbing her arm, while Yvetta sobbed harder. "I thought he really liked me!" she wailed at Amelia, looking all red-faced and snotty. Amelia murmured consolingly. I thought we didn't even like Yvetta anymore?

"Fine!" Felicia yelled, suddenly. "You just ignore me then, and worry about them!" And then she stormed off. I didn't know what the fuck was going on there, any more than I knew what the fuck to do about Yvetta and Yvetta's mother.

There was a piercing scream from the backyard and Pam burst in the door. "You have to punish them!" she yelled. "You have to tell them not to put wetas in the playhouse!"

"I didn't put it in the playhouse" Tray yelled. He'd come in hot on Pam's heels and he was, suspiciously, holding one of Sookie's Tupperware containers. One which now had holes poked in its lid. Oh, fucking terrific.

"They _live_ in the playhouse" Tray explained. "I was just collecting them so I could put them in your bed."

"You can't put wetas in my bed! That's just mean! Everyone's so mean to me!" And then Pam lunged for Tray and Tray yelled "Don't scratch!" and they crashed over, so I had to pull them apart.

"Out!" I said to Tray, and then I took the ruined container out of his hand, before pushing him in the direction of the door. "I don't get why I'm in trouble" Tray muttered, but he left.

Pam had forgotten her brother and was now staring at Chloe. "You have pink hair" she said.

"Yep" Chloe agreed.

"Pam, go to your room" I said to her and she gave me a filthy look and walked off muttering that "There'd better not be any wetas in my bed, or I'm putting Stan in Tray's bed!".

Sam came in. "I did tell him" he announced. "But he doesn't listen. Mum says he's like…" Sam stopped suddenly. I could guess what Sookie said, but I wasn't going to worry about that now. Not when I had dinner to make and two teenage girls to jettison before dinner.

It wasn't too much to do, was it?

"Dad" Felicia said, as she came into the kitchen again. At least she'd stopped yelling. "Dad, Tray needs help to move the couch in the living room."

"Why does he…oh fuck no" I said, as I realised what had happened. I guessed that hadn't been the only container.

"Don't worry!" Tray yelled. "I can see where it's gone…oh, fuck."

Yep, this weekend officially sucked, and it was still only Friday night.

**Thanks for reading!**


	49. Chapter 49

**A/N Yay, managed to get this written by just ignoring all my other chores. I'm living by the toddler's motto. If I say "But I bery want to!" then it's fine, no problems, I'm allowed.**

**Hence the fact she's wearing only a singlet and has built an entire city of blocks in the living room. She bery wanted to :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I stuck my head into the living room. All I could see of Tray was his rear end as he'd wedged himself between the sofa and the wall. "I think I've got it" he said.

"Good. Because you know how Sookie feels about wetas. If she comes home and finds one's moved in, I'm blaming you."

"Why is it my fault he ran?" Tray asked. "Ow!" he said. "He's in a shit with me, now."

"Can you blame him, Tray?" I asked, but there wasn't a reply. I left Tray to it. It was a good lesson in being responsible for the problems you created. Sam met me in the hallway. "Hey, where's Ivan?" he asked.

"Ivan?" That was a bit odd because he should have been here. Normally, he'd meet me at the door. Although his way would have been barred by the huge pile of stuff the kids had left in the doorway…which was still there I could see. But even so, Ivan didn't usually let minor setbacks like school bags prevent him from getting to me and drooling all over my leg.

"Yeah" Sam said. "I haven't seen him."

"Maybe Sookie took him to Kennedy?" I suggested. Leaving Ivan home alone for too long was never a great idea. He got bored, and created mayhem. Not for the first time I wondered if Tray and Ivan were related.

"I looked over the fence, but he's not there and Max is asleep. Max wouldn't be asleep if Ivan was over there. Max would be sitting beside his bowl growling because he hates Ivan" Sam explained. I was glad he knew so much about the inner workings of Max and Ivan's relationship.

Tray came out of the living room. "I got it!" he announced, holding his clasped hands out in front of him. "Want to see?" he said.

"No!" I said, quickly, but it was too late, as Sam had leaned over to look and, somewhat fucking predictably, the weta decided to escape. We all stood there and watched it climb the wall and perch in a corner of the hallway ceiling.

"Well, we know where it is" Sam said, presumably trying to look on the bright side.

"Yep" I agreed. "So let's move on to worrying about Ivan."

"I didn't do anything to Ivan" Tray said adamantly.

"Well, he's gone somewhere" I pointed out. Tray looked thoughtful, Sam looked worried.

"But where?" Sam asked after a minute. I had no fucking clue, but this was probably a good opportunity for the kids to practise thinking things through for themselves.

"If you were a dog, like Ivan, where would you go?" I asked Sam. Sam showed me he really did resemble Sookie when he was giving me a look that suggested he thought I fucking sucked.

"He can't have gone far" I said. "So where does he normally go?"

"The Furnans'" Sam said. "He likes their dog, you know, the big one. Bugger!"

"OK. Um…just take a walk and see if he is in their yard. Don't get caught" I said to Sam, and he nodded and started towards the door.

"Can I come?" Tray asked. Sam and I exchanged a look. It wasn't a good idea, not if Sam wanted to stay unnoticed. Tray was fucking loud at the best of times.

"I need you to stay here, and, um…watch the weta" I said. "Until I come back and we can get it down."

"Just watch it?" Tray asked. "You don't want me to try to climb up there?"

"Nope. I think we're good. OK, off you go Sam."

I left Tray standing in the hallway and went back to the kitchen. The situation in there didn't seem much better. "I just don't understand why he'd do it!" Yvetta wailed. "She's so old!"

"Boys are stupid" Chloe advised.

Amelia looked up at me. "Are you making dinner?" she asked.

"Yep" I said. "Later on though." And then I left the kitchen again. I wasn't really comfortable in there at the moment, and hoped like fuck they all moved to Amelia's room soon. Or went home. Preferably that they went home.

I walked into Pam's room, which seemed to have suffered from a glitter explosion. "What's going on?" I asked her.

"I'm making a welcome home card. For Mum."

"She only went this morning" I pointed out.

"Yes. But you told me to go to my room so I am Making the Best of It and Occupying Myself" Pam said, defiantly. And when had she started talking in capitals, anyway? At least, while utilising phrases from Sookie and me.

"OK" I said. "So, um…don't scratch Tray again…"

"But he was going to put wetas in my bed!"

"Never mind about that. Can you go in the kitchen and tell Amelia, quietly, that it's nearly dinner time and her friends have to go home?"

Pam looked at me suspiciously. Fuck, they all looked at me suspiciously. I didn't know why, I wasn't doing anything wrong. It was becoming patently clear to me that all the kids came from fucking Planet Sookie at times.

"Why me?" Pam asked.

"Because…um…you might want to hang out with them."

"They're all old" Pam said dismissively.

"One of them has pink hair" I reminded her.

Pam shrugged. "They won't listen to me" she said, and she opened another container of glitter and poured it onto some paper. Well, that wasn't fucking useful.

Felicia arrived in the room. "When's dinner?" she asked, plaintively.

"Soon" I said. "But...uh…kind of waiting on the guests to leave…"

"Guests? What guests?" Felicia asked. "You mean Amelia's tribe of loser-friends?" I nodded. Felicia looked annoyed. This could be useful.

"If they would just leave" I said. "Then I'd get dinner served up, but I can't while they're still sitting there…" I was left talking to myself as Felicia stormed down the hall.

"Go home!" she screamed into the kitchen. OK, maybe not quite the idea I'd been going for.

"Shut up Felicia!" Amelia yelled back. Yeah, definitely letting Felicia go in with the full-frontal attack might have been a tactical error. "You don't know _anything_!"

"What don't I know? Because I don't have a loser boyfriend who slept with _my mother_!" Yep, that didn't fucking bear thinking about.

"Because you're a _baby_, that's why!" Amelia screamed. "You're just a baby and you should just _butt right out_!"

I braced myself for the next verbal assault from Felicia, but instead she ran past me declaring "They're so mean!"

Well, that was fucking odd. And Amelia's party still seemed to be hunkered down in the kitchen, which didn't help me. We'd managed to recover one of our party though, because Ivan shoved a wet nose against my leg. God, he was filthy.

"Where were you?" I asked him, and he panted uncomprehendingly beside me. Sam appeared next to him. "He was at the Furnan's" Sam said, darkly. "Luckily he wasn't home yet. Mr Furnan."

"So did you get him back without anyone seeing you?" I asked Sam.

"Not really" Sam said. "I was trying to sneak around their house because I could hear the barking, and it sounded like Ivan. But she saw me."

"Who? Mrs Furnan?" She wasn't so bad, except that she was pretty brow-beaten by that ass of a husband of hers.

"No. The girl. Kayla. She saw me and wanted to know what I was doing. And then she wanted to talk to me." Sam said the word talk like it was the biggest drag in the world.

"What about?" I asked. I hoped the kids from that house weren't delivering fucking lectures on watching our dog now. It wasn't my fault Ivan had learned how to dig.

"I dunno" Sam said, shrugging. "She wanted to know if I was going to the park this weekend. I said maybe. She asked when. I said I didn't know, I've got cricket tomorrow. Then she asked about cricket. She's really weird." Sam looked pretty perplexed about it.

"Sookie likes cricket" I reminded him. "She's not weird."

"But she's Mum…so just. It's different" Sam said, adamantly. I'd have to take his word for it.

Tray walked up to us, looking slightly perplexed as well. "So, uh, did you guys see where the weta went?" he asked.

"Fuck, Tray. Really?" I asked, turning to him. "All you had to do was watch one weta."

"Yeah. But I had to go to the toilet. And, uh, I just wanted to fix some of my Lego…"

"Fucking fantastic. Now we have a weta loose somewhere in the house, and two extra girls in the kitchen."

Tray looked worried. "We're still getting dinner, aren't we Dad?"

I shrugged. "I guess. Maybe if we just go in there…if we all go in there, and start on it, they'll get the message."

Sam and Tray exchanged a look. I didn't think they were particularly enthusiastic about this plan. "If you want dinner, you'll come with me" I said, and we all walked back into the kitchen. The scene wasn't much better than when I'd left earlier.

"I just don't understand why!" Yvetta wailed. Well, none of us did. And sitting there at my fucking table wasn't going to get her any answers.

Ivan had followed the boys and me as well, and he was still pretty filthy. I walked straight through the kitchen to the laundry room to get one of the old towels to dry him off with. Sure enough, there in the pile of old towels was the t-shirt I'd lost. "It's not a very original hiding place" I said to Ivan. "I'm pretty sure she's used that one before." Ivan just panted a lot and didn't offer an opinion. I really liked Ivan.

Sam walked in. "Why are you in here?" he asked.

"Drying Ivan" I said. I wasn't in here for no reason, after all. And I definitely wasn't in here to hide from those girls.

"So what's the plan for dinner?" Sam asked.

"Get it out of the slow cooker and serve it" I said. It was pretty obvious, I thought.

"No. There has to be more to it. There's not enough food otherwise" Sam said.

"Well, go and check if Sookie left a note" I said to him, and I tossed the now wet and dirty towel on the top of the washing machine.

Sam went back into the kitchen, but I stayed put. I looked at Ivan, and he looked at me waiting to see what I was going to next.

I was thinking about that.

From the kitchen I heard Amelia say, loudly, "Tray, did you fart?" Tray sniggered. Maybe if I waited here for a while longer, Tray would drive them away.

"God, brothers are so disgusting!" Amelia said.

Sam came back in and gave me a weird look. "Um…there's only three things on here" he said, holding a post-it note in his hand.

"Just three?" I asked. That didn't seem quite right. Normally Sookie left a whole list of things we had to do.

"Yeah. It says: 'Feed kids. Do occasional headcount. Remember I'll be back on Sunday.' There's nothing about dinner" Sam said, as he handed over the post-it.

I stared at it. Sam was not wrong. As much as I wasn't a fan of the notes Sookie usually left, the ones which dictated what had to happen for every minute of every day, and had four hundred different options for every eventuality, I thought that maybe we were missing something.

"Well, I'm sure we can figure it out" I said, and I walked back into the kitchen. The smell wasn't pleasant, but it hadn't deterred Amelia and her friends. Or stopped the crying.

"Not all boys are bad" Chloe…it was Chloe with the pink hair, I thought, anyway…was saying. "You're pretty cute." She reached over to pat Tray's head and Tray flinched. I didn't think that was the reaction he'd been expecting to his stunt.

I stared at the slow cooker. "Well, that's got meat in it" I said to Sam.

"Can we have mashed potatoes?" Tray asked. "I know where they are." He pointed at the pantry.

"Um. Sure, Tray. Get peeling then" I told him.

"Peeling?" Tray asked.

"Yeah. Peel the potatoes. You can't leave the peel on" I told him.

"I don't…I can't…peel them?" Tray stammered. He seemed to be having difficulty with the terminology.

"Mmm" I said. "Sam'll help, won't you Sam? He likes mashed potatoes."

"I don't think it's a good idea" Sam said. "Remember the time with the carrots?"

"What? I was fine!" Tray said.

"You kept asking Mum if carrots were meant to be red! No they aren't! You were bleeding, you dickwad!"

"Yeah, but I was fine."

We weren't getting anywhere fast, and I became aware we had an audience anyway. Amelia stood up from the table and came over to where we were all standing around the slow cooker. "So that's, like, one of Mum's stews" she said, stating the fucking obvious. "And you need to do two minute rice." She pointed to some packets on the kitchen counter.

"How long does that take?" I asked her.

Amelia gave me a look. "_Two_ minutes" she said. "It's two minute rice. So just cook each one for two minutes."

Sam sighed. "I'll do it" he said.

"And you need to do peas" Amelia added.

"No we don't!" Tray said, vehemently. "Peas are just gross."

"Yeah, you do. I'm going to make that pasta with tomatoes for us."

"Us?" I asked, and Amelia looked thoughtful. "I just need…to talk for a moment" she said, her voice dropping down in volume. "Just, uh, come out here." She walked out of the kitchen and I followed her.

APOV

It was all very well Mum going away, but the place was starting to fall apart without her. All my life I'd thought she was a total mug for looking after Dad, I mean, no one can be _that_ useless. He had to be putting it on.

He wasn't putting it on. He was that useless. For all that he could order us all around, without Mum there to tell him what was happening, he was kind of lost. The boys had eaten a whole packet of biscuits for afternoon tea, Felicia had eaten most of a bag of chips and she was in a weird mood anyway. Well, weirder than usual. Pam was God knows where doing God knows what. Ivan had been wandering the neighbourhood, and no one could figure out what the hell to do for dinner. It wasn't _that_ hard. I mean, we'd all seen Mum do it for years and she might watch Masterchef but she didn't cook like that. It was two minute rice! It went in the microwave for two minutes! How freaking hard was that?

Still, it wasn't my biggest problem. My biggest problem was Yvetta and the fact I'd ended up bringing Yvetta home. I hadn't wanted to. I didn't even really want to be her friend anymore, even though she kept, like, talking to me at school and we still sat next to each other in French class because we'd picked our desks at the beginning of the year and we weren't allowed to change.

But she'd been really, really upset. And I could kind of understand why. I mean, knowing that Dylan had hooked up with Ana, eurgh! I tried to imagine what it would be like if Riley wanted to hook up with Mum, but I couldn't picture it. For one thing, Riley thought Dad hated him as it was. He wouldn't, like, try anything like that and risk Dad killing him.

Although, possibly Dad would only kill him if Mum put it on a note first.

Anyway, Yvetta was miserable during French and then Chloe and I found her in Mt Eden crying over her phone and somehow she came home with us. Chloe seemed really interested in it all, which I thought was a little ghoulish, but now I had both of them and neither of them wanted to leave, and I was stuck feeding them because, of course, they were both freaking vegetarians.

I managed to get Dad to come with me into the hall and took a deep breath. "I need to get rid of Yvetta" I said.

"Yep" Dad agreed. God, it was like pulling teeth. How on earth did Mum cope? I mean, if I said something like that to Riley, he understood. He didn't stand there staring at me like a big freaking idiot.

No wonder we had so many problems with Tray. Same gene pool. You could tell.

"So you'll have to talk to her" I prompted.

"What? I'm not…no. You're doing OK, Ames" Dad said.

"Not Yvetta!" God, he was so dense. "Ana. You need to tell Ana to come here and get Yvetta, because if Ana shows up then there's nothing we can do, she has to go with her mother. Doesn't she?"

Dad looked thoughtful. "Is it the, uh…well. I don't know. Her home life. Is it OK?"

Oh God. He picked the worst times to suddenly care about the welfare of annoying people.

"I don't know! I mean, I know she thinks Ana and Dylan hooked up, but it was just a text, she might be wrong. Can't you use one of your Jedi mind tricks to make her think she wants to go?" I looked at Dad pleadingly. I didn't want Yvetta to stay, I really didn't. I hated feeling responsible for making her feel better. This was way worse than when she'd been drunk at that party. God, it was horrible being the responsible one all the time.

"Who's a Jedi?" Tray asked.

"Oh, for God's sake!" I exclaimed. I wasn't getting anywhere with this lot.

"Sam's just about done all the rice" Tray announced, when he didn't get an answer.

"OK. So it's dinner then. I guess" Dad said, and he walked back to the kitchen.

Where was Mum when you needed her?

SPOV

Wine was lovely, and everything was lovely after wine. Even crappy frozen tortellini was better with wine. And I liked Tara. She was fun to hang out with. We should do this more often. Definitely.

"I can't believe we're so old now!" Tara exclaimed, throwing her hands around and maybe spilling a bit of wine. Meh. Not my carpet. And it was white wine, anyway.

"I know" I said. "I mean…I don't feel old enough to be this old, you know?"

"I do!" Tara said, enthusiastically. "It feels like soooo long since we were teenagers. God, remember when I stole that bottle of wine off my folks? And we got slaughtered in my bedroom when they were out?"

"And all you could talk about was how hot JB was?" I prompted.

"Yes! Well, he is. Even now. Even now he's ooooold like the rest of us." Tara giggled a bit. So did I and I wasn't really sure why.

"That was my first time. Drinking. Wine" I said. I hadn't really liked the taste then. It had grown on me.

'Well we're not virgins anymore!" Tara shrieked and she fell backwards on the couch. Somehow she managed not to spill her wine. That was a skill.

"Not with drinking" I agreed, taking a big sip of my wine. I liked the taste of this one. I wondered which bottle it was from.

"You've got five fucking kids!" Tara said, righting herself again. "Who do you think you're kidding?"

I shrugged. I wasn't really trying to kid anyone. It was kind of hard to when you did have five kids following you around bitching and fighting and generally bringing you down. I loved them, but the break was heavenly.

Although…

"I miss Eric" I blurted out, and Tara looked at me for a moment and I wondered if I'd broken the unwritten rule of girls' weekends away. But then she smiled. "I miss JB too" she sighed. "Wine makes me horny!" And then she giggled and I giggled because…oh, I couldn't really figure it out. But it was funny, anyway. And much better with wine.

EPOV

When it came to it, I couldn't fucking do it. I couldn't send that kid Yvetta back to, well, fuck knows what. I wanted to think her mother wasn't as horrible as they thought…but then hadn't everyone wanted to think the best about my dad too?

So we were stuck with her. And with Chloe who seemed excited at the prospect of a sleepover. Amelia seemed less than thrilled, which was odd, because she'd spent years and years pestering us to have friends to stay.

Of course Pam decided to take over that role. "So, can I call Venetia and Florentine?" she asked me, when we finally all sat down to dinner. "And have them over?"

"No" I said.

"But…but…Amelia has friends over."

"It's a, um, crisis, Pam" Amelia said, while glaring at me. I did not create the crisis and if Yvetta would stop snivelling over the pasta for five fucking minutes, maybe we'd discover it wasn't one, but at the current time, we were stuck with it.

"Well…I'm having a crisis too, then!" Pam declared. She ate some rice. "What's a crisis?" she asked.

"A really stupid thing that only stupid people want to call it when they can't stop crying" Felicia muttered. Yvetta glared at her. Amelia glared at her. Chloe beamed at Tray who she was sitting next to. "You can eat really fast!" she said to him. Tray didn't say anything; he just edged his plate further away from Chloe and tried to block her from it.

"No one tells me anything!" Pam yelled.

"That's because you yell at them!" Sam yelled back.

"Wow. This is way better than home" Chloe said. "Holly was going out with this new woman she met, so I was going to have to eat by myself. Again. That kind of sucks."

"Do you get all the food?" Tray asked her. With his mouth full.

"Well…duh. Yeah" Chloe said, shrugging.

"How does that suck?" Tray asked Sam. Sam looked at him and pulled a 'how the fuck do I know, girls are weird' face. And then they both carried on eating.

The rest of dinner went OK. As OK as you'd expect with seven kids sitting around the table. Sookie's note might have suggested checking I still had all five kids from time to time, but it didn't really cover off what to do if there were extras. I wondered what she'd say if we never got rid of Yvetta.

I'd worry about that Sunday, I figured.

More pressing was the problem of Felicia. She was…I didn't know how to describe it. Something was going on. She'd snap at Amelia, but if Amelia retaliated, she didn't come back. Instead she'd sit there, and look sad.

And when we were cleaning up dinner she blew up again. But at me, not at them, and I really wasn't the fucking problem. "I don't know why you're letting them stay!" she yelled pointing to Yvetta and Chloe. "It's not fair! I live here, and no one cares!" And then she stormed off.

Fuck knows what that was about.

"So Yvetta" I said. "Do you want to call your mother and, uh, let her know where you are?" Maybe they'd reconcile and it would stop being my problem, and I wouldn't have to feel fucking guilty about just sending her home.

"No" she said, vehemently. "No, the old cow can rot. I sent her a text and said I'm with a friend. She can stew about it all frigging night. I don't care. She's just horrible! You have no idea what it's like!" Then there were more tears and Amelia had to hug her while glaring at me.

So, fuck.

"Why do girls cry all the time?" Tray asked me, in a whisper.

"Mum doesn't" Sam pointed out. "Unless it's a sad movie, or a baby died or something."

"What baby died?" Tray asked.

"Any baby. When it's on the news. And she says 'the worst thing is, no one ever cared for it'."

"Oh" Tray replied. He didn't seem particularly interested in Sookie's reaction to reports of child abuse deaths. Pam was still very interested in Chloe though.

"So your mum let you have pink hair?" she asked.

"Mmm. She's not bio-mum though. My bio-mum is still in Nelson. She's with a guy now. That's weird."

"That is weird" Pam mused. "Boys are all stinky and disgusting. Girls are much nicer."

"That's what she used to think" Chloe pointed out. "But Holly says she got blinded by his sausages and never looked back."

"Pam!" I called. "Go and get your stuff ready for your shower."

"I don't want a shower!" she complained.

"We have to get that glitter off you somehow. Go." I started getting stuff ready to make coffee. I hoped Sookie was having a nice time. I hoped she missed the coffee though.

Pam came back. "Leesha won't let me in the bathroom" she complained.

"Well, tell her it's her turn later." I suddenly realised we had two extra people to schedule in too. I'd have to let the boys use the ensuite although they tended to make a fucking mess. Maybe they didn't need showers?

Pam walked off and I heard some yelling, and then she came back. "No" she said. "She says she's not budging. She says she wants Mum." Pam looked baffled.

That did sound odd. "I'll go and tell her she has to go" I said. This was all I needed really, someone creating a fucking logjam in the bathroom schedule.

I knocked on the bathroom door. "Leesh!" I called.

"Go away!"

"Leesh! You have to come out!"

"No I don't."

"You do, and I'm not standing here arguing about it."

"Well, go away then. I don't want you here anyway!"

"Let Pam in and I'll go."

"No!" She sounded desperate. "No, I don't want anyone in here. I want Mum!" Something was wrong and I couldn't figure out what the fuck it was.

"Are you OK?" I asked, through the door. There was no answer.

"Leesh?" I tried, quieter this time. "Leesh, let me in."

"No."

"Well I'm not leaving until you do" I warned her. I waited. I guess she was waiting too. It was kind of a stalemate. I wished I'd actually made the coffee and been able to bring it with me.

Eventually there was a click to signal the door being unlocked. I pushed it open to find Felicia standing there, arms crossed across her chest and tear stains down her face. Oh, fuck.

"Felicia, no one's pushing you out. We just have to, uh…well, Yvetta's having a tough time and we should…"

"Who the hell cares about Yvetta?" Felicia said, savagely.

"So, uh, what's the problem then?" I asked. I was totally fucking lost. I just wished everyone would stop fucking crying.

Felicia sighed, and looked away from me. I hadn't realised the towel rack was that interesting.

In the end she sighed again and dropped her arms to her sides, looking defeated. "I got my period" she said, so quietly I almost didn't hear what she said.

Oh, fuck.

**A/N So for anyone else who would like a reminder, wetas are insects. Like big, black, annoyed cockroaches.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	50. Chapter 50

**A/N Yeah. Busy week! Did get this done, though. Finally. Anyway the other night at dinner we got to listen to the big kid tell us her long rambling story (it was about dinosaurs and dinosaur robots, bizarrely, I think she's been hanging out with the boys at school). Anyway, the toddler wanted to tell one too. She said "I was walking through the forest and I saw a man..." Then she stopped. For quite a while. Trying to prompt her, my husband asked "And was he purple?" The toddler gave her father a look that suggested he was a total idiot. "No" she said. "Was a...sparkly boy-man!" And that was the end of her story. We're counting it as her first foray into Twilight fan-fiction. She's going to make me a fortune ;)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I should have noticed because of the tearful stomping. Tearful stomping was always a sign. There were other signs too. A certain amount of annoyance directed my way, although that occurred at random times anyway. Sometimes it was directed towards inanimate objects. And then there'd be the days when if I went within five feet of Sookie's nipples I was likely to get socked in the jaw.

But in my defence, I wasn't exactly looking for any of those signs in Felicia. Possibly because she was still only 11. And this was her first period. Wasn't it?

"So…uh, it's happened before?" I asked. I hoped like fuck the answer was yes.

"What do you think?" Felicia asked, sounding exasperated and directing a palpable amount of annoyance straight at me. Well, no would be my guess after that statement.

I sighed. "OK, so, uh, what do you need?" I asked, dreading the answer. "I could go and get Amelia?" I suggested.

Felicia looked horrified. "No! I don't want that bossy witch in here telling me what to do and then going back and laughing with her friends at me!"

"I don't think she would…" I tried to say, but Felicia cut me off. "No! Just no! I just want Mum."

"Well, she's not here."

"You could text her. And tell her to come home" Felicia said, looking at me pleadingly. I hated that. She wanted me to make it all better, and I did, I really did, but it wasn't really fair to drag Sookie all the way back from her holiday.

I wished I was at Piha with Sookie. The bach at Piha had a deck. That was a happy memory.

I wasn't sure this moment would ever be a happy memory. "Oh, um, no Leesh. It's not really fair on Sookie." I braced, and sure enough it hit.

"This isn't really fair on me either!" Felicia yelled. "I've barely even got boobs yet, why the FUCK do I have my period?"

Who the fuck knew the answer to that one? And if I could change it, I would. I really, really fucking would.

"Let's just focus on what we have to do…" I tried, but Felicia didn't like that statement either. "What do you mean 'we'? It's not 'we', it's just me! This is happening to me! ME! It's not fair!"

I started to wonder how many fucking years there were until Felicia left home. Pam knocked on the door. "Daddy! Can I have my shower yet?"

"Use the ensuite" I said to Pam.

"Can I use Mum's shower gel?" Pam called back.

"Yes" I said, thankful that Pam at least could be satisfied with something as mundane as shower gel, even if it was the very expensive one I'd bought Sookie on Mother's Day.

"So…?" I said to Felicia.

"I want Mum!" she hissed.

"Dad! Dad, should I take Ivan out?" Sam yelled through the door, which made Felicia roll her eyes and mutter about how rude everyone in the family was.

"Yeah, but just down to the park and back. Take Tray, he needs to go out too."

"Do I need to use the leash?" Sam yelled back. That didn't sound like a good fucking idea at all.

"Don't tie anything to Tray, he'll fucking strangle himself."

"No! Ivan!" Sam sounded exasperated. It would have been much easier to open the door and have an actual conversation with him, but I got the feeling that Felicia's mood wouldn't be improved by it.

"Oh. Well it's illegal to take him off the leash" I called back.

"So don't get caught?"

"That sounds like a plan. But not one I suggested to you."

"OK" Sam yelled back. I heard the sound of his feet running down the hallway.

"Now ring Mum!" Felicia urged. "Quickly!"

"No, Leesh. It's fine. I'm here." I kind of wanted to swap places with Sookie though, even if it would mean listening to Tara moan about JB for the entire night. It was possibly better than being shut in a small room with a now angry-looking Felicia.

"You're not who I want!" Felicia said, and I tried not to feel too hurt by that statement. Then she sat down on the lid of the toilet and burst into tears. Fuck.

"Don't cry" I tried. Unfortunately Felicia was just like her mother and didn't listen to me at all.

"Don't tell me what to do!" she sobbed. You could tell she was related to Amelia as well.

"Felicia, we just, we need a plan here…"

"Stop saying we!"

"OK, well, my part of the plan is helping you. What do you need? And don't say Sookie, she's not here. What do you need that I can get you, right now?" Felicia ripped off some squares of toilet paper and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

"This isn't netball" she muttered.

"No, maybe not. But I'm not prepared to admit defeat here." I wasn't calling Sookie and telling her to come home if I could fucking help it. As far as she was concerned, everything was fine and I was coping. Admirably.

"I don't think there's a winner, Dad. You can't win at periods! You just get them!"

"OK. Focus. What's the next step?"

Felicia looked up at me. She was looking at me like I was an idiot again. "You know, when they give you the stuff to read about getting your first period, it's never like this."

"No, so we're working outside the accepted practices. That's OK, sometimes that happens. Doesn't mean we have to fall to pieces."

"OK, I don't know if you're trying to convince me or you now" Felicia said.

"Maybe both. Now, back to the plan."

Felicia sighed. "I need some, uh…you know…?" she looked at me hopefully.

"Felicia if I knew, I'd be doing it" I said.

"I need tampons" she said in the end. "So you'll have to go and get some of Mum's."

"OK" I said, thankful that at least we had a plan. It wasn't a plan I was particularly on-board with, because it didn't involve anything I actually wanted to do. But I didn't get a choice, no more than Felicia had had a choice about her fucking period starting right now.

God, she had the worst fucking timing.

I went into the ensuite which, thankfully, Pam hadn't bothered locking. She hadn't bothered getting into the shower yet, either. She was busy lining up all the bottles of shower gel on the side of the sink and sniffing them all.

"That one's not very nice" she commented.

"That one's actually…" I realised that telling her it was lube was probably just going to confuse her. I hoped. "Not a very nice one. Don't use it."

"Is it yours?" Pam asked, wrinkling her nose.

"Yeah, I guess" I said, trying to open the drawer which held all of Sookie's things in the bathroom. Pam's leg was in the way though, which I didn't realise until the drawer collided with it. "Ow!" she exclaimed.

"You're fine." I started moving things around in the drawer, not really sure what I was looking for. I mean, I got the idea, and I was sure I'd seen them…just I hadn't paid a lot of attention, to the packaging, or anything else about them. Fuck.

"Are you looking for the tweezers?" Pam asked. "Because Amelia came and took them, says she's going to do Chloe's eyebrows. Amelia's good at doing eyebrows because hers are so thick. Do you think I should get her to do mine?"

I looked up from the drawer to meet Pam's gaze. You could barely see her eyebrows most of the time; they probably didn't need to be plucked. "No" I said.

Pam sighed. "That's what Mum said too."

"So if you asked your mother, why are you asking me too?" Pam didn't answer that. They never did when they'd been caught out trying to get a second opinion.

I couldn't see anything remotely resembling tampons, unless they were those round things that got stuck to everything else. "What the fuck is that?" I said, holding one up to Pam.

"Velcro roller" Pam said in a voice which suggested I should know. "I like this one" she says, finally selecting a shower gel. "It's the grape and basil one. Mum says they shouldn't work, but they do, and she likes it when she smells kind of fresh. And she has the matching body lotion too, so that makes the smell last longer."

"That's nice Pam" I said, not really listening to her.

"You're not listening to me" Pam said.

I hated it when the kids decided to be fucking perceptive. "I can't find what I want" I muttered. This was hopeless. I'd have to at least call Sookie, and then she'd feel bad and want to come home and we wouldn't have even made it one fucking night without her. I slammed the drawer shut.

"What are you looking for?" Pam asked.

"Just, uh…" Fuck, how did I put this to someone who didn't know anything about it? "Uh…women's things. For grown-up women…"

Pam scrunched up her nose. "Tampons?" she asked, and I nodded, not quite sure what to say. She opened up the cupboard under the sink and pulled out something small and wrapped in plastic. "Like that one?" she asked. I nodded again. I was having some trouble forming fucking words.

Pam sighed. "I _know_ what they are" she said. "I'm not a baby. Amelia told me. She said you have to stick them up your vagina every month to stop the blood escaping. Sounds gross. Why do you want one?"

It was pretty fucking clear about now that Amelia had a very big mouth and talked far too much at times. And that I really didn't want to stand around discussing vaginas with Pam.

"I just do" I said.

Pam wrinkled her nose, but handed it over. "You can't do craft with them. I tried, but Mum said no. The box is OK though."

"Excellent, Pam. Don't use all the shower gel." I walked out of the ensuite and back to the main bathroom.

"What took you so freaking long?" Felicia demanded.

"I couldn't find them." They weren't exactly an item I had to locate on a regular basis, after all.

Felicia gave me a look that suggested she thought I was pretty fucking useless, and I handed over the tampon. She didn't look impressed.

"Is that all there was?" she asked. I nodded, I had no fucking clue but I wasn't going back there to face Pam again.

"Well, it won't fit" she said adamantly. "So that's no good to me." She looked forlorn and a tear trickled down her face. I wasn't sure what was making me feel worse, the fact she might progress to wholehearted sobbing at any moment, or the horrific mental images conjured by the whole 'won't fit' statement.

I wondered if she'd notice if I just left.

"Aren't they all the same?" I tried, somewhat tentatively.

"You don't know anything, do you?" Felicia said, savagely. "There's different sizes!" There were? And why the fuck would I know that?

"Mum's always here!" Felicia continued, as she got herself really worked up. "She's never not here, and the one time she isn't, the one freaking time, is the worst time EVER! Why does everything bad happen to me?"

Well it didn't really. But I sensed this was one of those times when pointing out the truth wasn't going to win me any points.

"Why can't we use the bathroom?" Amelia's voice yelled from the hallway.

"Not now, Amelia" I said back. "If anyone's desperate, use the guest bathroom."

"But it's a guest bathroom!" Amelia complained.

"You have guests" I pointed out. Felicia was sniffing, loudly. I hoped that was the end of the crying. I was trying really hard to come up with a plan, but it wasn't working.

"What about, you know, one of those pad things?" I suggested. I was sure that Sookie might have one. Somewhere. They'd been around after she'd given birth, although that was a few years ago now. The last baby was now old enough to know where tampons went.

Fuck, this was difficult.

Felicia screwed up her face. "Ugh" was all she said to that.

"What are you doing in there?" Amelia called out. I'd thought, well, hoped she'd left. "You're talking to someone. Is Leesh in there?"

Felicia gave me a 'don't you dare' look, but I did it anyway. "Yes" I called back.

"Why are you in there with her? Was she bad?" Amelia asked, sounding very interested in it all.

"No" I said back through the door. I'd had a lot of conversations through this door by that point in time. I was starting to realise it was a really shit way to have a conversation.

I looked at Felicia, she looked at me. It was pretty much a stalemate. And then Amelia walked in anyway, I hadn't fucking locked the door.

"Get out!" Felicia shrieked.

"No!" Amelia said. "I want to know why you're all in here. Are you upset about Chloe and Yvetta? They can go home, I'm sure they can. If you tell Dad he'll send them home." Felicia looked confused, Amelia looked hopeful, I was pretty sure we'd already had that fucking conversation before dinner.

"I don't care about your lame-arse friends" Felicia said.

"Do you want to someone to stay then?" Amelia prodded. "Because you're right, it's not really fair I'm having a sleep-over and you're not. Pam's upset too, so maybe they should go?"

"Pam's got access to shower gel" I pointed out.

"Then what?" Amelia asked.

Felicia opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. "She's…uh…started her period" I said, and then I put a hand on the corner of the bathroom cabinet. Mostly so I would feel less tempted to run from the room. I'm not sure it worked.

"Oh" Amelia said, looking Felicia up and down. "Is that all?"

"What do you mean, is that all?" Felicia asked angrily.

"Well, you're not the first person it's happened to, you know" Amelia said, with the air of someone infinitely older and wiser. That didn't go down well with Felicia.

"Shut the fuck up, Amelia" she said. It was exhausting just being in the same room with her, the swings from misery to aggression and back again were starting to wear me out.

"Look, do you want my help or not?" Amelia demanded.

Felicia shrugged. "Dad's helping" she said. She didn't sound that sure that I was. "He got me this from Mum's ones." She held up the tampon. "I don't think it will fit though." I really fucking wished she'd stop saying that.

"It won't" Amelia assured her.

"So what am I supposed to do? I'm stuck here, with my fucking period, and you're all just standing around looking at me!" Well, I thought that was unfair. I'd been trying to help.

"That's the hormones" Amelia said to me. "She can't help it."

"No, it's you! Because you're a pain in the bum!" Felicia yelled. I couldn't understand how Amelia, as someone at the mercy of the same hormones, thought it was a fucking good idea to mention them to Felicia. Even I knew when that was a fucking stupid idea. Amelia was going to get killed right in front of me and there wouldn't be anything I could do about it. How the fuck I was ever going to explain that to Sookie, I did not know.

"Look, just be thankful it's not like it was when Mum's Gran was a girl, and you're not stuck using rags in your pants that you have to wash yourself." Amelia sighed, and looked knowledgeable about it all. I couldn't really comment.

"Will you stop talking to me like I'm a child!" Felicia said. "You're three years older than me, big whoop. And I'm still stuck with a period and only a tampon that looks like…well, I don't know. Does Mum really use this?" She held it up to me. I tried to maintain an expression that gave absolutely nothing away.

"Oh, hang on" Amelia said, and then she pushed past me and left the bathroom again. I wondered if I could leave. Felicia was muttering to herself so maybe she wouldn't notice?

Amelia was back quite quickly though. "Here you go" she said, holding out a box to Felicia. "Use one of those ones. You can have all of those, but make sure you give the box to Pam when it's empty."

"Is she making miniature theatres again?" Felicia asked. I realised that the females in this house had some kind of secret club that I wasn't party to, and it wasn't just because I didn't menstruate.

"Yep" Amelia said. "And little tiny people out of tinfoil. So do you need help?"

"With what?" Felicia asked, looking horrified.

"Well…it's not that easy, the first time. To get one in. I can hang around, if you want. You have to make sure you give it a reasonable shove…" I walked very quickly out of the bathroom and did not look back.

APOV

Poor Felicia. It wasn't her fault her period arrived right now, when Mum's away and she's stuck with Dad to try to help. He wasn't really helpful, he just seemed completely lost. He could not organise a piss-up in a brewery, as Mum would say when someone was being incredibly useless. And not only did I have to help Felicia get hold of some tampons, but I had to put up with her yelling at me about it too. She should have been yelling at Dad! He was the one who was just standing there, leaning on the corner of the vanity.

If only it was as easy to get rid of Chloe and Yvetta. It wasn't that I didn't like them, well, I liked Chloe. Yvetta was, like, a huge pain in the bum, quite frankly. But I just wanted to be alone. I wanted to get into my pyjamas and chat to Riley on my laptop and have a quiet night. School is really hard work and on Fridays, I just want to chill. I don't want to have to deal with everyone else's problems.

"I can't believe he did that! She's horrible!" Yvetta wailed, when I went back into my room, after I'd finished with Felicia. God, so she was still on about that. On and on and freaking on.

I wondered if I could yell at her and blame it on hormones.

"It was _just_ a text…" I said, and Yvetta gave me a horrible look, like I was big freaking idiot. I wasn't, because the big freaking idiot in this house had gone to make himself coffee and probably rock in a corner. I was the voice of reason; at least I thought I was. Mum always said she was the voice of reason when she tried to stop Dad let the boys do stupidly dangerous stuff, like climb onto the garage roof to get grapefruit off of Kennedy's tree. Kennedy would give us the grapefruit for a start. Dad just didn't think things through.

Someone had to be the voice of reason when Mum wasn't here, after all.

"He was texting my mother!" Yvetta said. "And she says that she wants someone to look after her, and Dylan has a job so of course she'd want him." Dylan had a crap job, I thought. I didn't say that.

"Danni kept on texting the butcher down in Nelson" Chloe said. "About meat deliveries. And then she ran off with him." Oh, that wasn't helpful. Chloe had no idea how to comfort someone.

"She's just jealous of me, because I'm still young and she's all old and has saggy tits" Yvetta said. Yeah, that wasn't a nice thing to say about your mother. Yvetta was really mean to people and it wasn't nice to be around, at all. She was totally bringing me down, and I'd been feeling quite good because I'd helped my little sister with her first period and stuff. I was a nice person and I didn't need to hang out with someone who was awful half the time. It wasn't that long ago she'd been awful to me.

It was just that I felt bad for her when she was upset. I wanted to make it better, which was an annoying freaking feeling to have. I wasn't the one who got her into this mess in the first place. God, I hated being like Mum. Next thing I knew I'd bring home some absolutely freaking useless foreign person and let him live with me.

"Well, you can get someone better then" I suggested, although it would have to be someone who liked bad dye-jobs. Yvetta had pinched my idea to dye her hair black, too. And you could bet she'd deny she ever told me it was a stupid idea, now she'd be all like 'no, I was going to do it ages, ago'. She's so two-faced sometimes.

"But I love Dylan!" Yvetta wailed, and she burst into tears. God, I wanted to go and hang out with stupid annoying Felicia and not Yvetta. At least Felicia had an excuse. And she might need comforting. It wasn't much fun getting your period. Mine always sucked, and the freaking period pains were horrible.

"I'm going to go and check on Leesh" I said, and I left them to it.

EPOV

The boys arrived back home, both of them, and Ivan, so that was a good thing. There was a lot of banging about in the hallway by the front door and the sound of the bags being moved, but not actually picked up. Someone tripped over one I thought, and there was a thud. Tray yelled "Get off me!", Ivan barked, Sam laughed.

By the time I got to them, they'd moved it into their room and both of them were on the floor. "You're not in charge" Tray said, but his words were kind of muffled as Sam was pinning him down at the time, and trying to punch him on the shoulder as many times as he could before he got thrown off.

There might have been a lot of aggression in that room right then, with Sam and Tray wrestling each other to the death. There might have been the distinct possibility that if I got too close to them, I'd just be collateral damage. But I would so much rather be here, with them trying to kill each other, than back in that bathroom, with all the tension and simmering anger Felicia was displaying, any fucking day of the week. I'd be happy if I never in my life had to have another conversation about the size of a tampon again.

"Guys, knock it off" I said, and they ignored me, Tray continued trying to throw Sam off. "I said…" And then I realised it was a losing battle, and if I couldn't beat them, I might as well fucking join them, and I pinned both of them to the ground.

I felt better after that, and I wasn't sure whether it was because I'd managed to prove that even when the two of them took me on together, they still had a hell of time trying to pin me to the ground, or whether I'd just needed something to counter all the, well, fucking female-ness of the evening up to that point.

I sent the boys off to get ready for bed and then I went into the kitchen to finally have a cup of coffee. In peace. I sat at the table, and I looked at the ship in a bottle which now sat on the windowsill. I liked having it there; I always found it peaceful looking at that ship and fuck knows most of the time there was very little peace in this kitchen.

Although the kitchen was lonely without Sookie. I missed her. The ship in the bottle was good, but it wasn't as good as Sookie giving me a shoulder rub.

But I couldn't change it. I drank my coffee. I looked at the ship. I patted Ivan's head when he came and sat next to me. I moved Edward off the kitchen table three times when he couldn't understand his presence wasn't fucking required. I read some of the latest news on my phone. I pretended I couldn't hear Pam hurling insults at her brothers and Felicia yelling at all of them that she just wanted them all to shut up and stop acting like babies and was that too much to ask?

I did my best to enjoy the peace and quiet I had in the kitchen. But then the phone rang anyway.

**Thanks for reading!**


	51. Chapter 51

**A/N Hello! Here I am at last! In case any of you missed it, I published a different story yesterday. Completely different for me, and different from a lot of the stuff around. It's called Hole in the River and it's a melancholy little tale, so don't read it if you're not feeling up to being a little sad. Or, read it and then come back to this chapter, which isn't sad at all :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

"And then" I said to Tara, waving my glass expressively. "And then, after I'd hauled the damn thing all the way from the States, he put it on the freaking windowsill in the kitchen, so I have to look at it all the bloody time! I honest to God thought that if he liked it _that_ much he'd keep it in his office, preferably hidden by a leaning tower of printed-out emails, but no. No, I wasn't that lucky, and now every time I am in the kitchen, I am stuck looking at Eric's stupid, wonky ship in a bottle. I hate that thing." I took a big slurp of wine. I think this one was good. I maybe didn't really taste it.

"It was bad enough that he wanted to pick all the colours for the house, and half the kitchen table chairs are different because he would not back down on his choice, but now I'm stuck with that bloody thing forever!"

"Eric…or the ship in a bottle thingee?" Tara asked. She was slurring her words slightly. I was glad I wasn't as drunk as she was. She was going to regret that in the morning.

"Both. I guess" I said. And then I laughed. Well, it was kind of funny. Something was, anyway.

"It's the orgasms" Tara said, knowledgably. "They bamboozle you with them."

"I don't think I'm bamboozled" I said. I didn't feel bamboozled, that sounded like I was a bit hopeless. And yet…I still had that stupid ship in a bottle in the kitchen.

"Bugger it" I said, taking another mouthful of wine. "Maybe I am."

Tara nodded forcefully. "We all are" she said. "It's their secret weapon."

"What? Sex? I thought that was our secret weapon?"

"That's what they want us to think" Tara said, still nodding and trying to drink at the same time. It wasn't a pretty sight.

"You make it sound like a war" I said to her. It wasn't like that, I was sure of it.

"Sometimes it is" Tara says. "And you can't give ground to their ships…or, or, anything like that, you know?"

Not really, but I nodded anyway. I thought there was maybe some sense under there somewhere. I hadn't had the heart to tell Eric where to shove his stupid ship in a bottle after we'd got back from the States because I felt sorry for him. And now I was stuck with it.

"It would be easier, if we were gay" Tara said.

"No it wouldn't. I'm not bloody turning gay for you. For one thing, you're embarrassingly drunk right now!" I was speaking quite loudly, I realised, but that was OK. Tara fell over in a fit of giggles.

"That's OK that you don't fancy me" Tara said, wiping her eyes. "I don't really fancy you either, despite your enormous norks. Seriously, Sookie. How do you manage not to fall on your face when you walk anywhere?"

Part of me wondered if I should have been insulted at that comment, but I realised that Tara had said worse things to me over the years, some of them when she was sober. I could take it. And it was kind of funny. Sometimes I wondered myself.

"Anyway" Tara continued. "I kissed a chick once, and it wasn't that crash-hot."

That was news. I tried to adopt my most 'oh, really?' nonchalant air, but I failed. "You did what?" I asked.

Tara was looking at me like she didn't know what I was on about, and then she giggled. For a long time. I poured myself more wine while I waited for her to finish. I would have topped up her glass too, but she was waving it around too much for me to even attempt that.

"When?" I asked her.

"At my fortieth" Tara said, frowning at the wine bottle. Well I would have topped her up, but she wouldn't bloody stay still. She topped her own glass up.

"I was at your fortieth" I said slowly, checking my memory. No, I could remember all of that night because I wasn't drinking. That's right, I was pregnant with Pam. When wasn't I pregnant for those few years?

"Only for a little while" Tara said. "You bailed because you were up the duff and grumpy with it." OK, there were holes in her memory of that night. No wonder she was slobbering all over…well, I didn't know who.

"Who was it?" I asked.

"You remember that woman I knew from the kids' school? McKenna?"

"Vaguely" I said, trying to place her. And then I did. "Her?" I asked.

"Wow, I'm so glad you didn't pull _that_ face when I said I was going out with JB."

"Well…just…" I wasn't sure how I'd ended up having to try to pretend I was happy that Tara had kissed some snooty friend of hers. "You wanted to kiss her?"

"Sure I did" Tara said. "Just because…I don't know. I mean I was turning _40_. That seemed old…at the time…"

"It did" I said.

"But you were still popping out babies" Tara informed me. "So I don't know…I thought I should try it. I mean, I only ever really dated JB. It wasn't like I had lots of different experiences or anything. I thought I'd give it a go."

"In a mad fit of panic at turning 40?" I asked. Maybe that was mean, but I figured I was getting my own back for the crack about my boobs. And maybe it was the wine talking. Although the fact I recognised it was the wine talking, meant that it probably wasn't. That was my logic and I was sticking to it.

"I don't know if it was like _that_" Tara said, very defensively. Yeah, she could give it, but she couldn't take it. That never changed. "But I don't know. It was kind of, um…her lip-gloss tasted funny for one thing. I actually didn't like it. Katy Perry lied, I think." We both laughed at that, but maybe we weren't laughing as hard as we had been earlier on.

"I used to be annoyed that you'd had your babies so early…well, not early, but you know. Earlier than me" I said. "I wanted that too…but Bill kind of dragged his feet on that issue." I'd never quite got to the bottom of that one, and I never would now. It had been a long time since I'd thought about it, and after I'd finally convinced him and we'd had Amelia it hadn't been worth thinking about. But for a long time he shut me down on stuff like that. We spent all that time living in London for one, and clearly not settling down to a life of domestic bliss. I didn't regret it, and I had enjoyed it, but I had been very aware that Tara and JB were back in Auckland, buying a house, getting married, having a baby. Well, they always say the grass is greener.

Tara shrugged. "I used to do 2am feeds and wonder what you were doing in London" she said. "It sounded wonderful."

"Probably I was working. It was the middle of the afternoon. Unless, of course, it was a long lunch day. Let's just say a bottle of wine and some hoisin duck sandwiches don't mix."

"Euw!" Tara squealed. "See! You were having fun without me!"

"If you call throwing up into a plastic bag in a tube station fun, then yes. God, I tried so hard to hide how drunk I was from Bill when he got home. He was very sympathetic though, but quite disapproving at the same time."

"Thank God we've learned our lesson about drinking too much!" Tara declared while checking the now empty bottle of wine to see if there was any more in there. I hoped she was right.

Tara struggled to her feet and walked to the kitchenette, and came back with another bottle of wine. She unscrewed the cap and poured herself a generous glass.

"And you've replaced Bill with someone far more glamorous" Tara said. OK, well her brain-mouth filter had gone totally. Still, I decided it would be mean to pull her up on it.

"Is this Eric Northman we're talking about?" I asked, and Tara looked at me blankly. "Seriously, you don't know the half of it. It's like he thinks they stopped making t-shirts sometime in the first decade of this century. He wears them until they're just rags. I had to hide another one in the laundry cupboard with the dog towels before I came away. He's hopeless."

"Well, he always looks alright when I see him" Tara mused. "Do you dress him?"

I'm sure that wasn't meant to be that funny, but I giggled and giggled and giggled at the image that conjured up for me. Because the couple who couldn't decide on what chairs to have in the kitchen could actually pick each other's clothes.

"Yeah, I guess you're right" Tara said. "JB wouldn't take it either." And then she giggled a bit herself.

I managed to recover myself enough to drink some more wine without spraying it everywhere. "And, you know…I still haven't found a nice way to tell him to move the ship in a bottle" I said.

"Must be the sex" Tara said.

"Must be" I agreed.

EPOV

The voice on the other end of the phone was insistent and it took me a while to work out what she was saying. The accent did not help.

"You have my daughter!" she said, again, and I finally figured out who I was speaking to. An introduction would have made the whole exchange a lot fucking easier.

"She's here. But I don't _have_ her" I said. "She's with Amelia." That woman made it sound like I'd kidnapped Yvetta, and tied her up somewhere. I don't think she quite realised we weren't actually the ones who orchestrated her flight to this house.

"I knew it!" she said. "That little…madam, that's what they say isn't it? That little madam she make things so difficult for me. She just take off and I don't know where she is, and I call the boyfriend, that Dylan, but he hasn't seen her either. And I don't know who else she might be with when she texts me to say she's with a friend. Only friend she has is your daughter. Of course she's with you." That still sounded like an accusation.

"She's upset" I pointed out. "And she can stay for the night. Amelia wants to have a sleep-over." I realised it sounded wrong as soon as I said it, I didn't think they still had sleep-overs at their age. But I figured it got the fucking point across.

"I want to speak to your vife! She'll know how I feel, not having my baby at home." I got stuck on the word vife for a minute, until I worked it out. Wife. Yeah, fat fucking chance of that.

"She's not here" I said, and from the gasp on the other end of the phone, I immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say. Fuck. I should have said indisposed or one of those other shit terms which could be translated as 'does not want to talk to you'.

"What do you mean, not there? But she's looking after the girls, yes? It's not just you there, is it?"

"No" I said, slowly. "It is not just me here." That wasn't a lie, because the house was full of kids, and, fuck it, it wasn't like I needed a babysitter. I was the fucking babysitter, for her daughter as well.

"So she'll be back soon, yes?" Yvetta's mother said. That didn't seem to be a real question, so I didn't bother answering it. I figured that the less I said, the less likely I was to say something that might prove incriminating later on. I didn't think that was a bad strategy at all.

"Look, the girls are having fun and…oh, hang on. Here's Amelia. Talk to her." Amelia had walked into the kitchen and I held the phone out to her while she gave me an annoyed look and mouthed 'what?' I mouthed 'Take it!' back and she reluctantly took the phone out of my hand.

Well, that got rid of that fucking problem.

"Hello?" Amelia said, putting the phone to her ear. "Oh, hi Ana. Yeah, she's here….No it's fine, she's just uh…she had a bad week…school, yeah….I know. Exams are tough on everyone…No, no, I don't mind. My other friend Chloe is here too…Pyjama party, yeah…Um, Mum?...Did he?..." Amelia looked over at me and looked confused, I looked at my phone. "Oh, well, yeah…she's um…she'll be back, yeah…later on…"

Amelia seemed to be adopting the same strategy I had, don't say anything that wasn't strictly true. I was pretty proud of that.

"OK, well I'll get Yvetta to call you in the morning, Ana. Yeah, you have a good night too." Amelia disconnected the call and put the handset back in its cradle. "Oh my God!" she half-screamed. "Dump me in it, why don't you? And, like, she thought Mum was just out, because you'd said she was coming back?" Amelia stared at me accusingly.

"You didn't correct her" I pointed out.

Amelia huffed, and went over to the coffeemaker and pressed the button to make herself a cup. "Oh, why isn't this thing working?" she complained. I stood up and started making some more coffee, Amelia stepped further back, away from the steam that had started up. She got the hint and walked over to get more milk out of the fridge and brought it back to me.

"So, it's going OK?" I asked. "In there?" I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of venturing into Amelia's room at the moment. I'd had my fill of hormone-fuelled teenage girls for the night, and those were just the ones I was nominally responsible for on a day to day basis. Other people's teenage girls were even less appealing.

Amelia shrugged, as she took the coffee I passed her. I'd made myself more and we sat down at the table. "It's OK" she said. "Pam's in there with them."

"She's supposed to be in bed" I pointed out.

"Yeah, but she's super-excited about having someone new to dazzle. She's got my glitter nail polish and she's doing Yvetta's hands and feet, which is kind of gross, but she's happy, and I think Yvetta likes it. She doesn't have a little sister. I have two." Amelia sighed, and sipped her coffee, gingerly. It was still pretty hot.

"How is Felicia?" I asked.

"She's watching a movie with the boys, one of those, like, stupid comedies where everyone farts a lot. They all think it's freaking hilarious! It's, like, really really not!" Amelia seemed pretty adamant about that, I was just glad Felicia had cheered up, even if it meant she was probably sitting there torturing her brothers. Well, they were big enough to move to another room if they got sick of it.

"Well, that's everyone accounted for, at least" I said to Amelia.

"Yeah…" she said. "I just, well, you know. Wish I knew what to do about Yvetta."

"Mmm" I said. It wasn't really our problem, and that was the answer I'd been about to give. Except that somewhere during the evening it had become our problem. And now she was here and we hadn't even broached the subject of the real reason she was here with her mother.

Amelia and I drank our coffee in silence for a while. "You know" she said. "It's kind of nice in here, away from, like, all the drama. Everyone else just keeps melting down."

I nodded. It was kind of nice. And I even liked having Amelia to talk to now.

"So…have you got any plans for the weekend?" I asked her, and she gave me a weird look, like she couldn't understand why I was asking her.

"Well, me and Riley are going to the movies tomorrow night…but you knew that, right?" I didn't, but I nodded anyway. I knew now, after all.

"He's letting me pick for once, which is good, because I do not want to see another movie where everything gets blown up by aliens again. They're so stupid those ones, and I mean, I could just, like, stay here and let Tray pick the movie if I wanted to watch crap like that. I might shout the popcorn though, so Riley doesn't feel so stink about watching a romance. Yvetta saw it and she said it made her cry…" Amelia drifted off.

"You want some cash?" I asked her.

"Oh. Yeah. That'd be good" Amelia said, and she drank some more coffee. "I hope Yvetta goes home soon" she said.

"Me too" I agreed. "And maybe Chloe as well?"

"Oh, she's not so bad. Although I think she thinks that she might be able to, like, come with me tomorrow night, and she's not crashing the movie with me. She won't think it's sad and then, like, she and Riley will laugh at me."

"I think when the morning comes everyone will feel a bit better about it all" I said. That's what I fucking hoped anyway. The longer they were here, the harder I figured it was going to be to get rid of them.

"Yeah…" Amelia said, thoughtfully. And then she finished her coffee and stood up to put the cup in the dishwasher. "Well" she said, turning to face the door. "Better go and check that the guests are all OK. Although I don't think they really count as guests when they're both wearing my pyjamas." She sighed, and she walked off and I was by myself again. It felt a lot lonelier this time.

APOV

Well, maybe Dad wasn't so bad. A little hopeless, but mostly harmless. He did make me coffee, and he was going to pay for the movies which did, like, only seem fair because I _had_ sorted out that whole two minute rice thing at dinner. _And_ I'd spoken to Ana when she had rung looking for Yvetta.

"And then I'm going to pay for Miriam to come over here, so that's great, isn't it?" I could hear Pam talking to Yvetta and Chloe as I walked back to my room.

"Well, yeah. Because the rampant consumerism over there must get her down" Chloe said. "It's all the McDonald's and the fact they cut down the forests to feed the cows."

"We have McDonald's" Pam pointed out.

"Oh, look! I've smudged that one. Pam can you re-do my toe, there?" Yvetta asked, in her sweetest and most annoying voice.

"Your mum rang" I said to Yvetta when I walked into my room. "She wanted to know where you were."

Yvetta immediately looked, like, really grumpy. "She can go jump" she said. "She didn't care about me, did she?"

I didn't know if Yvetta really wanted an answer to that. She was looking hard at Chloe who was flicking through my iPod. I decided I wasn't going to answer her either. She was starting to piss me off, big-time.

"Well, maybe in the morning" I said.

"Not likely!" Yvetta scoffed, and Pam tutted. "You have to hold still" she said to Yvetta. "Or else I make them all smudgy."

"Pam you should be in bed, anyway" I said to her, and she shrugged. "Daddy said if you go now, he'll read you a story."

"A long story?" Pam asked.

"Yep, definitely." Pam smiled and put the nail polish down and trotted off as everyone said goodnight to her.

"I don't think I'll be able to sleep at all!" Yvetta said. "I'm far too upset!"

So that was, like, super-terrific. I really, really, really hoped she was going to go tomorrow.

It was going to be a freaking long night.

SPOV

"And he keeps trying to tell me that having sex on the dryer is a really good idea!" I said to Tara. Quite loudly. Somewhere in there I was aware that my brain to mouth filter had switched off, but I didn't care anymore. It was only _Tara_. She'd heard worse, I was sure of it. And who was she going to tell, anyway? Her girlfriend McKenna who didn't even know me? No, I was just sharing. That was OK.

"Because of the vibrations?" Tara asked.

"Well, I guess. But I honestly think it would put me off, you know?" I said, and Tara nodded. Yeah, she got it. "I mean having something under your bum going 'der-der-der-der' is just…um, distracting. I don't think he gets that I have to be in the right head-space, you know?"

Tara nodded. She nodded so much I thought her head might fall off. Hah! That was funny. "Sometimes I don't think JB really gets it _at all! _And then I have to finish myself off" OK, that was _waaay_ too much information really. I didn't need to think of that.

But I wanted to know the details. I really did.

"What? Like while JB watches, or something?" I clapped my hand over my mouth. Had I actually asked Tara that? Shit.

"Kind of" Tara said. "Sometimes I just go into the bathroom." She seemed off-hand about it, but I was…how the hell had I ended up knowing that? Time to change the subject.

"Maybe you should just call your girlfriend McKenna?" I suggested, and then I laughed. Yeah, that was funny. Was it? Christ.

Tara was laughing. Yeah, it was. Phew. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was glad I hadn't put my foot in it. "So if you won't have sex on the dryer, where will you have sex?" Tara asked, and I panicked. I mean, just because she was sharing did I have to? Had I started it with the stuff about the dryer?

"Oh, well. I had sex on the freezer once. When it used to live in the garage…" I trailed off. I was sharing. Bugger. It was clearly the wine talking and not me, so that was OK.

"A freezer?" Tara screwed up her face. "That's, uh…not exactly romantic" she said.

"And the dryer is?" I asked, and then we both giggled. We giggled a lot.

"I had sex in the bathroom at JB's parent's place once" Tara confessed. There was more giggling.

"I've had motel bathroom sex, but it was kind of uncomfortable" I said.

"Do you get off on uncomfortable?" Tara asked, but she was giggling so she wasn't being unkind.

"No. But, well, you know, Eric is very persuasive. When he's all right there…and, and, stuff…" I said. OK, not a good defence. But my brain was addled from the wine. Wine which Tara kept encouraging me to drink.

"Oh! You're _so_…um, what's the word…rhymes with kitten…" Tara was looking at me earnestly and waving her hand in a hurry-up motion.

"Smitten?" I suggested.

"Yes!" Tara said, pointing at me and nearly tipping over sideways. "You're so smitten with Eric! I think it's cute!"

I wasn't sure I wanted to be cute in Tara's eyes. Or maybe Eric was the cute one? Or maybe it was having sex on a freezer because neither of us had done it before that was cute? I didn't know. I couldn't keep up, really.

I shrugged. "I just like him" I said. "I really, really like him."

"That's _really_ cute" Tara said, a touch patronisingly. OK, so I was the cute one.

"At least I didn't marry my boyfriend from high school" I huffed at Tara. She shrugged. "I know, but I'm smitten too!" she shrieked, and then we giggled some more.

"It's the sex" Tara said. "It's how they get you every time."

"Yeah" I agreed. "Also, I think he's kind of funny."

"Well he has that accent" Tara said, smiling.

"And he's hot."

"I know. I can't believe JB still looks so good for being our age. It's really not fair. Why isn't he sagging?"

We were quiet for a bit. "I guess we're quite lucky really, aren't we?" I asked Tara.

"I guess" she agreed. "Oh and look! There's a bit more left in this bottle. Go on, sup up, and I'll give you some of this. See, we're really lucky!"

And I was lucky. I felt lucky right up until I got into the spare bed in Tara's bach. For one thing, the bed was kind of faulty and kept spinning whenever I rolled over. For another thing, I missed Eric terribly. And I was horny. Since when had that been one of the after-effects of drinking too much? Maybe it always had been.

Thank God Tara hadn't made a pass at me.

I rolled over, and regretted that move. Stupid spinning bed. It was only because I could hear the ocean that I thought I could feel movement.

If I had Eric here, I thought, he would take my mind off it. With sex. That would work.

I sighed. I just wanted him here, for about…oh, fifteen minutes would probably do the trick about now. No dryer, just us and a stupid moving bed. That was all I wanted. Just Eric.

Well, Eric and for the bed to stop moving.

It was going to be a very, very, very long night.

EPOV

When Amelia left the kitchen and I finished my coffee and contemplated the state of the room. Normally after dinner Sookie did a whole heap of tidying up, and gave her beloved oven a good cleaning. But it wasn't too bad. I could leave emptying the dishwasher until tomorrow morning, I figured. And that inner part of the slow cooker needed to soak anyway, so that was fine. There were a few spills and stuff around, though, most notably from where Sam had been slopping leftovers into a container, so I wiped those up.

I wasn't sure what to do next.

I went to check on the occupants of the family room. Sure enough, Felicia was now taking her problems out on her brothers. "Tray!" she yelled, as I opened the door. "If you make another fucking smell I will break your arm!" Tray just sniggered on the other end of the couch.

"When this is finished, it's bed time" I said.

"But there's a better movie on next" Tray exclaimed. "We're just waiting for that one."

"Yeah, this kind of sucks" Sam said, while simultaneously laughing at the screen.

"You suck" Felicia said, giving Sam a punch in the leg. To his credit, he didn't retaliate. I think he knew she was having a tough night.

I was pleased she seemed better. She was wearing a baggy old t-shirt for a night-dress. One of my t-shirts…at least it had been. I hadn't seen it in a while. I thought I'd left it in the laundry when I went to the States…and I guess that had been my mistake.

I didn't have the heart to take it back from her now. I figured I'd just wait until it next went in the laundry. I'd tell Sookie to look out for it, maybe.

"Can we make popcorn?" Sam asked, looking at me expectantly. I knew what that meant, they'd eat about two-thirds of it and then use the rest to have a popcorn fight and we'd be picking pieces of fucking popcorn out of the cushions of the couch for fucking days on end, that was if Ivan didn't eat it all and make himself sick in the process.

I was about to say no way in hell when Felicia looked at Sam. "Are you going to make it for all of us?" she asked.

"Well, duh. Yeah" Sam said, and then he muttered something under his breath. It was probably something along the lines of 'because you'll beat me up if I don't share'.

"Oh. You're kind of sweet, really. For a stupid brother" Felicia said, and then she turned to Tray and tried to push him off the couch. Tray yelled, Sam went bright red and didn't know where to look, and I decided it was just better to keep Felicia happy. Whatever happened, I didn't want to end up in another situation where she was locked in a small room with one of her siblings.

"Yeah. OK, sure. But after the next movie, bed." There was a chorus of general agreement. Hopefully they'd get tired on their own and go to bed, and, anyway, sitting up a little later wasn't really going to hurt them, was it?

Pam, however, needed to be in bed. A tired Pam was a grumpy Pam and then no one would be fucking happy. She wasn't in her bedroom when I got there, though. Only Stan was and there was a bit of a stand-off when he glared at me and I glared at him. I wasn't fucking leaving just because that cat thought I shouldn't be here. This was my fucking house after all.

I sat down heavily on the bed, and Stan bounced, which pleased me no end. He sat up, and with one final glare, jumped down and stalked out of the room.

I hadn't spent all those years living with Bob for fucking nothing.

I looked around Pam's room. Her desk was covered in a tableau of Barbies. One of them was sitting beside the little pink washer-dryer that really worked. I suddenly felt very lonely. I missed Sookie, and not just because I hadn't yet managed to trap her in the laundry room.

Well, maybe not _trap_ exactly. It was just that if I could work it so she was in there, and the dryer was running, and I was between her and the door to the kitchen, it might seem like a good idea to have sex. I just hadn't quite got my timing right yet.

Pam burst into the room. "Look!" she said. "My teeth are all sparkly!"

"Great work, Pam. Now into bed." I moved off the bed, so she could climb in, but she didn't. She skipped over to her bookcase and pulled off a shiny pink hardback book before placing it into my hands.

"It's a little late for a story…" I said, as Pam started moving her toys and pillows off her bed. She hummed a little as she did it. And she took a fucking long time.

"But you said!" Pam said, still moving things. "You said I could have three stories."

"I did?" I couldn't remember. I'd promised the kids a lot of shit tonight, and the evidence of that was that I had two extra people staying here and a marathon movie session going on in the family room.

"Yep" Pam said, nodding, and tucking Mr Fluffy in, quite tenderly. "You said to Amelia that I'd been so good and hadn't complained about not having a sleep-over that I could have three stories to make up for it."

'Um…" From my recollection Pam had complained. A lot. But now she was sitting up in bed and smiling at me expectantly and I didn't have the heart to tell her that she'd annoyed the fuck out of everyone at dinner by not shutting up about her friends with the ridiculous names. It was like they were strippers at a fucking theme-bar or something.

"OK" I said. "Three stories it is. Which ones are we doing?" I looked down at the book I was holding. Oh, fuck no. Not the Barbie stories. Again.

"First, we do the one where Barbie's a mermaid and she's pretty and has pink hair. Then we do the one where Barbie goes to the Fairy World and the fairies are all pretty and have sparkly wings. Then I want the one where Barbie wants to be a Musketeer and she gets told girls can't be one. But they can. Can't they Daddy?"

"Um. Yeah. I guess."

"Cool. I want a sword. And a horse. But mainly a sword."

"I'll, um…see what Santa says."

"I don't think he brings swords. I think it'll have to be you. Will you get me a sword?" Pam looked at me through her pale lashes.

"Maybe we could make one?" I suggested. What harm could cardboard do, really?

"And put glitter on it! OK!" Pam seemed excited. Well, that was easy to fix.

I just wished I could fix the way I felt after I finally tucked Pam into bed. I felt lonely and not quite sure what to do next.

My phone was still in the kitchen, and when I looked Sookie had sent me a text. _I mess you!_ _And Tara thanks we're cute! _ It read. Well the typos weren't a good sign, but it was nice that she missed me.

I missed her too. I wasn't looking forward to having to sleep alone. I never liked doing it, and it was worse when it was our bed. The space that was supposed to have Sookie in it was right there and it was painfully obvious she fucking wasn't.

Fuck it, I thought, I'd just go and join the kids in the family room.

"You're a horrible brother!" Felicia shrieked, and she tried to jam some popcorn down the back of Sam's shirt. "I hate you!" Tray was quietly laughing, pleased someone else was getting Felicia's wrath, but trying not to draw attention to himself.

"OK, just knock it off!" I said, and they sat back down again. "Now shut the fuck up and watch the movie." I sat on the couch next to Felicia. "And pass the popcorn."

"She started it" Sam hissed.

"Shut up, Sam" Felicia hissed back. "You're dead meat, you understand?"

It was going to be a long fucking night.

**Thanks for reading!**


	52. Chapter 52

**A/N So this is kind of short...but I ran out of time. I'm going to blame...the toddler! Mainly because she's standing next to me, having stripped off all her clothes and put my t-shirt on as a kind of dress, she's now going "Nah, nah, nah, nah!" Wisely, perhaps, the cat is nowhere to be found at the moment...**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

"Dad!"

Something poked me, rather viciously, on the back. I jerked and immediately worried that I'd woken Sookie, although once the object I'd rolled over onto didn't immediately squeal or kick me, I realised it wasn't Sookie, it was her pillow.

But I still didn't know what had poked me, or why.

I rolled over and Sam was standing there, holding a cricket bat. Well, that answered one fucking question. "What the fuck, Sam?" I asked. And then I put my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes. I really didn't think we needed to be rushing around this early.

"Dad!" Sam said again. Urgently. I didn't quite get what the fuck could be that urgent at this time of the morning. "Cricket!" he said. Well that wasn't fucking urgent.

"No" I said to him. "We are not playing cricket. Before breakfast." I lowered my voice. "Or ever." It was a really fucking pointless game which most of the time no one won. It was nice that the New Zealanders wanted to be inclusive about things, but it didn't mean I had to fucking join in with them.

Sam had other ideas. "No!" he said. "Get up now! I have to go to cricket!"

Oh, fuck. Yeah. I'd completely forgotten that Sam had actually started playing in a cricket team…or club…or whatever the fuck they called themselves. Fucking knitting circle perhaps, given the sweaters some of them wore. I'd looked forward to the end of the soccer season and no more early starts on Saturday mornings, and then Sam, and Sookie, came up with this brilliant fucking idea.

I looked at Sam. "We have to get ready!" he said.

"What time do we have to be there?"

"Eight forty-five" Sam said, glancing anxiously at the clock.

"What time is it now?" I asked, dreading the fucking answer. It maybe hadn't been such a fucking crash-hot idea to let everyone sit up late last night, and watch multiple movies. At the time it had seemed OK, apart from when Tray yelled because he thought he had seen the weta on the ceiling, and Felicia tried to beat him into a bloody pulp when he admitted he'd only been joking. We still didn't know where the weta had gone. I hoped it had walked outside.

"Um…ten past…" Sam said.

"Seven?"

"Eight…" Sam took a step backwards. I have no fucking idea why.

"Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, Sam. Really? You couldn't wake me up any fucking earlier?"

"I only just woke up" he said, sounding defensive. It wasn't much of a defence; it was his fucking cricket game after all. I didn't fucking care if he got there or not. "And I can't find my stuff…" He looked in the direction of the door, as if it would magically fucking appear. Or maybe that Sookie would appear and tell us all where it was, like some kind of fucking magic genie.

So, I had to fucking get up then? Fucking terrific.

I hauled myself up so I was standing and then I stopped. I really wanted a shower…but there wasn't fucking time. I picked up the t-shirt I'd left beside the bed the night before and pulled it on. Jeans. I'd need jeans too. I opened up the closet to find some.

"We haven't got a lot of time…" Sam said, from the other side of the bed. I took a deep breath and tried to be very fucking calm.

"I fucking know that Sam, but it's not really my fault, is it?" Sam didn't have an answer to that one, he just stood there watching me as I went into the bathroom, and he was still there when I came out.

"So do you know…?" he started, and stopped.

"Try looking, perhaps?" I suggested. I suggested that quite nicely I thought. Sam left the room. Fat fucking chance he'd find his stuff. We'd probably find that fucking weta first.

I wondered if Sookie was awake yet. And if she'd mind getting a text about the missing cricket gear. And what gear you actually needed for cricket, anyway.

SPOV

I woke up, but I didn't open my eyes. Not just yet, anyway. Stupid bed was still spinning because I could still hear the stupid ocean. Also, I probably drank too much wine. I wished that had occurred to me when I was still drinking it.

I reached over and patted around for my phone and braved opening my eyes to read it. Ow. It was 8 am, which seemed incredibly early. There was a text from Eric which read _Don't get too messy without me_, which just made no sense at all. He really needed to check for typos…and sense. Usually if I was around I got to read some of his work emails, and weed out the overly aggressive language, but this was just a bit…weird.

And my brain hurt.

I needed to pee, I wanted to get up and drink some water and take some of the painkillers I had in my handbag. I really wanted coffee. I wanted Eric to be there with me so he would get up and make me coffee, although I was hot and I realised that having him here would have led me to be more hot and headachy than I already was as he draped himself all over me.

It would have been worth it for the coffee.

In the end I went with what I could manage at that point in time. I rolled over, shut my eyes tight, and hoped to doze off again.

EPOV

I walked into the kitchen and found most of the family already in there, including, bizarrely, Amelia, who was never up this time on a Saturday.

"What got you up?" I asked her.

"Jeez, you're grumpy" Amelia said. Grumpily. And then she did something even worse, she pushed my hand away from the coffeemaker. "You haven't got time" she said.

"But…" I thought I did. And I wasn't going to be much good to anyone without coffee, I was pretty fucking sure of that.

"I don't think he actually works without coffee" Felicia said, from where she was sitting at the table. "And if he falls over and stops working I'm telling Mum you did it."

Amelia ignored her and kept looking at me. It was fucking disconcerting. I just wanted one cup of fucking coffee in my own fucking kitchen. It wasn't like I was going to set fire to the place. I don't know why it was so bad.

"I still haven't got my stuff" Sam said, sounding worried. He looked around, kind of uselessly. Were the kids always this bad at keeping track of their own belongings?

"Where does your stuff normally go?" I asked Sam, while trying to get a bit closer to the coffee maker. Amelia pointed a finger at me and said "No!" before turning to take some toast out of the toaster. Fuck.

"In the bag…" Sam said.

"And the bag goes where?" I prompted.

"Um…" Sam said.

"There's bags in the hall" Tray announced, with his mouth full of toast.

"They're all over the place. It's messy" Pam said, while she lined up three jars of jam and looked them over. I hoped she was intending to eat the jam and not spread it all over herself like the shower gel the night before.

"Not my bag for cricket though" Sam said.

"Look in your wardrobe" Amelia advised.

"But…" Sam said, and Amelia gave him the same look she'd given me when I'd just wanted a fucking cup of coffee. "Just look!" she commanded, and in her face was a scary conflation of both the bossy little three year old I'd first met and Sookie.

Fuck, that was weird. And I still needed coffee.

Sam ran off, and Amelia busied herself with the toast. "He'll have to take breakfast with him" she said to me.

"Yeah…if only there were fucking pop-tarts in this country" I said to her.

"They were gross" Felicia advised me. "But not as gross as Tray…Tray, close your big, fat mouth while you're eating!" She reached across the table and smacked him on the arm. I didn't have the energy to break that fight up.

Because I fucking needed coffee.

Sam came back carrying a large sports bag. "Got it" he said.

"So it was in your closet all along?" I asked.

"Yeah…" he said. "Dunno how it got there."

"Magic fairies" Amelia said, rolling her eyes. No one I think quite realised she was being sarcastic. They were all used to the magic fairy that was Sookie. And Sookie would have let me make one fucking cup of coffee.

Sam started checking through the bag. "OK, yeah, I've got everything" he said.

"Is your cup in there?" I asked him, and he frowned. "What do I need a cup for?" he asked.

"Here's your water bottle" Felicia said, passing it to him.

"No. Not that kind of cup" I said. There was a moment of silence. "Oh!" Sam said in the end. "Box. Yeah, that's there."

"OK, you have to go" Amelia said. "Here's your breakfast, it's Marmite and cheese" she handed Sam a sandwich. Made with toast. Odd.

"Here's yours" she handed me the same thing. "It's peanut butter and banana because you're weird and don't eat Marmite." I didn't actually eat peanut butter and banana, either, but I wasn't about to tell her. Not when she looked like that. And when I hadn't had coffee.

"Here's your lunch, you've got ham sandwiches and banana and biscuits. Don't eat the biscuits first."

Sam looked like he wanted to tell Amelia she wasn't the boss of him, but at the moment, she seemed to be. And she was giving him food, so he held it in.

"Now go!" she said, and we did.

Luckily Sam was only playing at Cornwall Park. I hoped. He was a bit vague about it all. I really fucking wished that Sookie had left a more detailed set of instructions. Sure the endless fucking lists of chores, directions to household items and screeds of alternatives that practically made the whole thing a choose-your-own-adventure story were fucking annoying. But sometimes, just sometimes, they did actually fucking help.

It wasn't easy getting a spot to park in at the grounds, and Sam was starting to fidget. "I'm supposed to be there" he muttered, as we waited for another car in front of us to pull into a spot.

"Yes. You are" I agreed. There was no point sugar-coating it. He should have been more prepared for this. And woken up fucking earlier.

Once we'd parked Sam jumped out of the car and started through the parking lot, carrying his bag in one hand and his bat in the other. I followed him onto the grounds to check everything was OK and then, I figured, I could leave.

Sam had joined his team and I noticed for the first time that his socks were an incredibly bright shade of red which really didn't fucking go with the rest of the all-white ensemble he had on, and was nothing like anything the rest of the team were wearing.

Well, not much I could fucking do about that now.

I was about to leave when Sam jogged over again. "We won the toss" he said. I wasn't sure whether congratulations were in order, but he carried on. "So are you going to stay to watch me bat? I'm number three this week." I really wanted to go home, drink some coffee, eat a breakfast that wasn't mashed banana jammed between peanut butter toast, and have a shower. Also I would maybe try to figure out how to get Amelia's friends to leave our house, but that would come later. First I wanted food, coffee and to get clean.

But it looked as though I wasn't going to get my way. "Sure" I said. "I'll stay."

"Great" Sam said, and he turned around, and then turned back. "Just…uh, Dad?"

"Yes, Sam?"

"Don't, uh, don't stand too close to anyone else, eh?" Fuck, really? That was from the kid who hadn't brushed his hair or probably even his teeth that morning?

Sam took my silence for compliance, or maybe embarrassment, and ran off again. And I was left standing there, by myself, as per Sam's fucking instructions. I glanced into the parking lot and saw one of those mobile coffee vans parked there. Thank fuck for that. Sam hadn't said I wasn't allowed to go and get coffee.

Except when I checked, I did not have my wallet. This was a fucking disaster of a morning.

My only hope was the spare change in the glove box of my car. Sookie euphemistically called it parking money, but I'd yet to actually use it for that. Normally it was used as 'Oh God, it's mufti day at school again' money or 'We just had lunch, why do you need a smoothie?' money, or, just every so often, I got to use it as coffee money.

However, when I pulled out all the coins I could find in the glove box, there didn't seem to be that much there. I guessed at some point Sookie had raided it. Again. And not replaced it. Again.

I stood in the parking lot behind my car, trying to count the amount I had and I was suddenly aware that there was another couple a few cars down watching me, and whispering to each other. Sure, it wasn't my best look, I hadn't showered, I definitely hadn't shaved, and I was standing there counting a handful of coins. And I would have opted for shoes, but I'd thought I was just fucking driving here, and driving home again.

I really didn't think I looked that homeless.

"You alright, mate?" the guy called over to me.

"Yes" I said, waving a hand at him in what I hoped was a gesture that signified I wasn't actually dangerous or about to snatch any handbags.

Just then another car pulled up and parked, on a particularly bad angle. The driver's door opened, not very far, there was cursing, and then the door shut again, the car backed up, straightened out, and drove forward again before finally stopping.

Another kid in his white uniform jumped out of the passenger seat and started running. I vaguely recognised him as being part of Sam's team. A woman got out of the driver's side and screamed "For God's sake, Harry, run!"

And yet they thought I was fucking scary. Had they not seen this woman?

She came over to me and held up a hand in greeting. The hand wasn't holding coffee, so I wasn't really interested in her. "You can't get them ready, can you?" she said.

I wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. I would have been ready if anyone had told me I had something I needed to be ready for this morning.

"Mmm" I said, and I tried counting the coins again, but it was hopeless. I was still fucking short.

"Harry was supposed to be batting at number three" the woman said to me.

"I think they gave Sam his spot" I said. This conversation was very boring.

"Oh, right. I knew I knew you. You're Sam's dad!" she said. I wanted to ask if I looked that fucking bad, but I didn't think I wanted to know the answer. "Yes" I said in the end.

She sighed, and looked like she expected me to say something else. I didn't really have anything else to say.

"I might go and get coffee" she said, which was just fucking cruel. She looked at the coins in my hand, and then at me. "You want some?" she asked.

"Yes" I said without thinking, because I really fucking did. I followed her to the coffee cart, feeling slightly like Tray when he followed Sookie around trying to get food from her, or maybe even fucking Ivan. I wasn't quite like them of course; I certainly wasn't as fucking annoying for one thing.

But I did really want that coffee.

"My shout" she said. "You can get it next week."

Thank fuck for that. And thank fuck I could translate the whole shout thing these days, it had taken me a while to figure that one out when I'd first arrived. I had wondered why New Zealanders wanted to make such a big fucking deal about paying for things. They had some weird fucking terms.

Once we had the coffee we walked back to the grounds, just in time to see someone in Sam's team get knocked out.

"Oh, a wicket already" Harry's mom said. Yeah, that's what it was called. And then Sam walked on. Thank fuck I hadn't missed that.

The kid pitching…or whatever the fuck it was that they did, threw the ball and Sam…well, he hit it. That was a good start.

I really wanted to yell something, but the fucking weird thing with cricket was that you didn't. You clapped, which was hard when you were holding coffee, and you murmured things that the kids on the field couldn't fucking hear. Things like 'well done', and 'nice batting', and 'good work.'

Occasionally Sookie yelled 'watch the bottom hand, Sam' which had no meaning to me, and I wondered if I should yell it now, but I decided not to. It didn't seem quite appropriate.

Sam managed to stay in for quite a while. I had time to finish my coffee, wish that Harry's mom would find someone else to talk to, and send Sookie a photo on my phone of Sam batting.

And then I got really bored. Cricket was boring. I didn't get it. And I didn't get why Sam wanted to play it.

I was kind of glad when one of his hits was caught by the other team. I felt bad about that, but, fuck, this wasn't the best way to spend a Saturday morning.

Sam walked off the ground and dumped his stuff with his coach, and then he came running over to me. "Did you see that?" he asked me.

"Yep" I said, which wasn't a lie. I had been here. I had seen what had happened. I didn't get any of the fucking rules, but that was probably beside the point.

"I was pretty good, eh?" Sam asked me.

"You were terrific" I told him, and he beamed. And then he launched into a long discussion about what he had or hadn't done while batting which made my eyes glaze over a bit, but that was OK, he was happy.

"So you can go now" Sam said to me. "'cos Callum's mum's going to bring me home."

"Um…which one is she?" I asked, and he pointed. We went over to talk to her and make sure that was OK while she glanced repeatedly at my feet in a worried fashion. When that was settled, I could finally leave. As I walked back to the parking lot Harry's mom waved at me. "See you tomorrow!" she said enthusiastically.

Fuck knows what that meant.

APOV

Yvetta snored, so I couldn't sleep. Not a wink. Chloe could sleep, though. Probably because she ground her teeth in her sleep so she couldn't hear the snoring. But not me, no I had to listen to the pair of them.

I really needed Yvetta to go home, just for, well, my own mental health really. It's not good to miss out on a lot of sleep; I know that because I read it in _Dolly_ magazine, in this article about how it wasn't good to, like, sit up all night and chat to your friends and stuff. But I don't do that, and I didn't even get a chance to talk to Riley last night because I had Yvetta and Chloe there.

And the super-gross thing was that Yvetta was, like, telling Chloe all about how to give a good blow-job. Like she's actually done it, and not just read about it in _Dolly_. I mean, I don't think she has, but Chloe was all super-interested and believed her and then I knew they'd want to ask me if I had done it, and that stuff is really private. You do not talk about sex with your friends. They don't need to know what goes on between me and Riley.

And I haven't done it. And I like kissing Riley, but I'm still not sure about stuff like _that_, because I still think it might be a little bit gross. Or a lot gross. I mean, when they have it in books and stuff, it sounds OK, in theory…and then you think about it being your mouth…there, and I just think it's a bit euw.

But unlike Yvetta's really stupid boyfriend Dylan, Riley doesn't try to make me do anything like that. And Riley's really happy just kissing me, and he thinks I'm pretty, so Yvetta can just take her blow-jobs and go jump.

So I didn't want to listen to that. Especially when Yvetta started saying that maybe that's why Dylan really likes Ana…euw, euw, double-euw! So I went and sat in the family room for a bit. With my family.

That was odd. Even Pam was there, because apparently she got out of a bed and had a hissy-fit that the others were watching a movie without her. Even though it was a _Star Wars_ one. Again. It's not like we haven't seen them before.

But they were OK, even Felicia who is really super-crampy and I felt a bit sorry for her. Not when Dad yelled at her for punching Tray though, even if he did yell about the weta that wasn't there now and make me jump. Because even though Tray deserved something, he probably didn't deserve to be hit _quite _ that hard, but Felicia has a bit of a temper.

I can't figure out though how she got that from Dad when she's not actually his kid. I mean like, how does that work? I mean, you can see why Tray's hopeless and Pam has hissy-fits and is really anal about how stuff smells, because it got passed on, but I don't get Felicia. She clearly has issues.

I said to Mum once we should get her counselling, and Mum said don't be mean, but wasn't trying to be mean. I was trying to be helpful. But no one likes it when you're helpful. Like, I had to get up early because Dad wouldn't and make Sam's lunch for cricket and stuff and no one said thank you, not even for the nice breakfast I made them, or when I worked out where Sam's cricket stuff would be.

Without me they'd be lost.

Thank God though, Yvetta and Chloe had slept in, because I couldn't stand another repeat of the blow-job stories. I don't know why Chloe is so interested; I think she's a lesbian. I think she has to be if she has lesbian mothers…although I don't really know. I don't want to ask her, because it's rude.

Like I don't want to tell Yvetta to go home, because it's rude. But I might see if I can make her call her mother.

Or get Dad to tell her. That might work better. As long as he showers first, though, because he was niffy when he was standing in the kitchen trying to make coffee when he didn't have time.

I bet Mum's glad she's not sharing a room with him while she's away. I bet she's having a nice time with Aunty Tara.

I hoped she came home early. I was getting exhausted, and that wasn't ideal in the lead-up to exams.

And I really needed more sleep.

SPOV

I opened my eyes and rolled over. It was very bright now. But the bed was still spinning, and my headache was still there.

I looked at my phone. It said 10am now. I'd probably slept long enough, even though I didn't feel like it.

I sat up and looked at the photo Eric had sent me. It was Sam batting. Using way too much bottom-hand. He was going to get caught out doing that.

Still, at least they'd made it there. Clearly everything was under control and they'd read the entire note. That was good to know.

I sent a text back which read _Tell Sam good work_, and, after a stop in the bathroom and a rummage through my handbag, walked out to the kitchen in search of some coffee. It was probably too much to hope that Tara would be up and would have made some; she wasn't a big coffee drinker. There was only instant or plunger coffee anyway.

I opted for instant, I couldn't be arsed messing around with the plunger. And when I'd made my coffee and drunk some water to wash down the two ibuprofen I'd grabbed from my handbag, I took my coffee out onto the deck. I probably didn't need to spend any more time staring at all the empty wine bottles. Surely at least a couple of those were here before Tara and I got there the day before?

Yeah, that was really bright. I went back inside and got my sunglasses and tried again. That was marginally better. The breeze was nice; it had gotten really stuffy in the bedroom I was in. And it was nice watching the surf in the beach down at the bottom of the hill.

But it was kind of lonely, even if five kids shouting and climbing over me wouldn't have been great in the condition I was in. Having Eric here might have been nice though.

I guess absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all. Plus, he did make good coffee. And this coffee was crappy.

Before I went out in search of decent coffee, though, I'd need a shower, clean clothes, hair and teeth brushed and shoes on. I wasn't sure I could face all of that just yet, so I stayed on the deck and sipped my crappy coffee and wondered what was happening at home without me.

**Thanks for reading!**


	53. Chapter 53

**A/N So my toddler is now fluctuating between still using odd concepts and baby-talk and moments of sheer precociousness. The other night my husband was home late and she said "You stuck to work, Daddy?" and, after a minute he figured out she meant stuck at work, so he said yes. Then she asked "You pull yourself?" and he had to think for a bit on that one too, but I pointed out if she thought he was stuck, then pulling kind of made sense. "Good thinking" he said to her, and she turned to him and said, very clearly, "Yes. I am a good thinker." I know! Thank God, we have her really.**

**If only she could come up with a plausible excuse as to why the laundry wasn't put away, that's the thing :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I opened the door to the house to find not only the same pile of bags and assorted belongings that had been piled up since the previous day, but the sight of two girls yelling at each other. It wasn't the first time I'd witnessed such an event, of course, but this time the participants were Felicia and Yvetta.

I wondered just how comfortable in our house Yvetta was starting to feel. And whether we'd actually ever get rid of her. Sure, it had seemed like the right thing to do the day before when I'd worried about just how responsible her mother was, but now I started to worry about what it was I'd actually fucking taken on.

As much as I'd wanted someone to step in and take me away from my dad when I was that age, I was starting to appreciate why no one fucking had. It was really shitty being the adult in the situation and having to figure out what the fuck was the best course of action.

"You can't just walk in to someone's room!" Yvetta shouted at Felicia.

"It's not your room. You don't LIVE HERE!" Felicia screamed back.

"So?" Yvetta challenged. "You're not allowed to be _rude_ to me then."

"I'm rude, seriously? You think I'm the rude one?"

"Just…everyone shut the fuck up" I said, as I picked my way through the bags. While they stood there, glaring at each other, I walked between them and headed to the bedroom to get my long delayed shower. When I'd finished, I got to spend some quality time with the coffee maker and a suspiciously empty kitchen. I wondered where the kids were and what they were doing.

I decided I didn't want to know.

But it wasn't long before I found out anyway. I thought I'd take my coffee and go and do some work. No such luck. Pam had appropriated my office in order to Skype Miriam in the States. Of course she couldn't use Sookie's.

"Look!" Pam said, holding up a big piece of cardboard in front of the screen. "This is the card I made my mu…mom for when she gets back!" A shower of loose glitter fell off the card and all over the desk and the keyboard of my laptop. I was going to be fucking trying to get the sparkles off my suits for weeks, thanks to that.

I was about to say something to Pam, but I could hear Miriam telling her how much she liked Pam's work, and I figured fuck it. Let her have her moment.

But that still left me with nothing to do. Walking past the boys' room I could hear voices in there, and I stuck my head around the doorway. Chloe and Tray were standing around looking at his Lego collection.

"Have you got any of the Ninja ones?" Chloe asked Tray. "I used to like the Ninja ones, but mostly I was only allowed the gender-neutral things because, well, it's not good to like, stick kids in boxes is it? So I wasn't allowed the beauty shop or anything. Which Pam has, doesn't she? Did you build that one for her?"

Tray gave me a look of pure pleading, the same look Ivan gave me whenever I left the house. The one that silently communicated desperation, longing and a plea to take him with me because if I left him here, it was going to be crappy.

But like Ivan, Tray would be OK. I kept walking. I didn't venture anywhere near Amelia's room where I could hear heated words now being exchanged between Yvetta and Amelia and I tried Felicia's room.

"What?" she said, pulling out one of her ear-buds as she looked at me.

"So…you're OK?"

Felicia rolled her eyes. "Of course I'm OK, why wouldn't I be OK?"

"Well, you know…" I said. She hadn't been that OK the night before when she'd been locked in a bathroom, crying and asking for Sookie.

"You just fuss for no reason" Felicia informed me. "You're as bad as Amelia."

I didn't say anything to that, and Felicia just put her ear-bud back in and picked up her phone from where it sat on the bed next to her. I assumed I'd been dismissed and left the room. There was still quite a commotion coming from Amelia's room, but Amelia sounded like she was in control of it. I thought. She'd tell me if she needed help, anyway.

I was thinking about getting another cup of coffee when Pam appeared in front of me. "Are you ready yet?" she demanded.

"Ready?" I asked. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be ready for.

Pam sighed. "For going out. Mum said you'd take me to Spotlight."

I'd been to Spotlight. It was the weirdest place on the planet and its stock consisted of soft furnishings, ugly knick-knacks, sewing paraphernalia, party supplies, and a bunch of stuff for doing craft. I could not fathom what on earth the appeal was, but Pam loved the fucking place.

"Um…I don't think that was part of the plan for today…" I said. Even if there had been a note, it wouldn't have contained that particular instruction. I was pretty sure that Sookie didn't hate me that much.

"But Mum said!" Pam said, stamping her foot.

"That's not really an argument" I pointed out, which didn't elicit a particularly great reaction from Pam. She certainly wasn't coming up with a new argument.

"You can't change the rules! Mum said! She said you'd take me to get new glitter _and_ new stuff from Smiggle. My gel pens ran out!"

Pam wanted to go to that fucking stupid shop Smiggle as well? Oh hell no. "That's not happening Pam" I informed her.

"Mum said it was!" Pam shouted. She stamped her foot again and clenched her fists in an attempt to really get her point across.

"Pam, your mother says a lot of things in a really funny accent" I said, trying to diffuse the situation. It did not work.

Pam did stop fuming, but she looked at me slyly. "She doesn't think it's a funny accent" she said.

I shrugged. "She wouldn't" I pointed out. Sookie didn't even think she had an accent, which was just fucking odd. It was like she couldn't hear all the times she replaced 'i' with 'u', or the times she added an 'r' sound in randomly. It surprised me any of the kids ever learned to spell correctly and I didn't think the fact I, say, left a u out of colour when I wrote it down was really that much of a problem in comparison.

Probably that wasn't a line of thinking I should have shared with Pam.

"But that's mean" she said. "You can't make fun of the way she talks!"

"I'm not so much making fun of it, as just…commenting on the differences. Differences that I appreciate, because it makes your mother…uh, kind of special to me."

"Uh-huh. And now you're _bullshitting_. Mum says you do that too. To cover your tracks, when you realise you've stuffed up." Pam folded her arms across her chest and looked up at me.

"What else does Sookie say?" I asked Pam.

"I'm not telling!" Pam said. "Because she doesn't say mean things! I'm only telling on mean things!" She waited to see if I understood the implicit threat. Unfortunately, I did.

"OK, Pam" I said. "We can go to Spotlight."

"And Smiggle!" she said, excitedly.

"And Smiggle" I agreed. "Are you ready?"

"Yes!" Pam said nodding. I looked at her. She was wearing her Supergirl costume, complete with the red cape attached, and a plastic multi-coloured tiara on her head. She had a pink purse with that white cartoon cat on it strapped across her torso and on her feet were multi-coloured sneakers which were covered with peace signs and jewels and which lit up when she walked. She looked fucking weird.

Why did none of the kids get any fucking dress sense?

Pam saw me looking and twirled. "I look awesome!" she announced.

"Yep, you do Pam" I agreed. She might be shit at dressing herself, but at least she had self-esteem.

"Let's go then!" Pam shouted, as she ran down the hall.

"I'll just tell Amelia we're going" I said, and I braced and headed to Amelia's room. When I opened the door, Yvetta and Amelia both turned to glare at me. "What?" Amelia asked.

"I'm just going out. With, uh, Pam" I said. For some weird reason, I almost felt like I was asking Amelia's permission.

"To Spotlight?" Amelia asked. I nodded yes. ""Don't let her buy too many different glitters, Mum's got some in the pantry that she's been saving up for a rainy day" Amelia announced.

"Oh. OK" I said.

"Fine, well. Off you go then" Amelia said, waving a hand at me. I considered myself dismissed by yet another daughter and went out to join Pam. Whatever the current topic of discussion was in that room, I got the feeling it was pretty tense between them, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be involved.

I started to feel a little better about going to fucking Spotlight with Supergirl.

APOV

I was starting to get a bit worried that I was stuck with Yvetta forever. I mean, she'd spent all night, like, taking over my room, and then in the morning she was wandering around as if she owned the place, although that was only after she got up. She slept _late_. I didn't know how she could sleep through Sam banging around panicking because he was going to be late for cricket, but she could.

And then she hogged the bathroom, used my makeup, wanted to borrow clean clothes from me and generally like, just pissed me off. Royally. I wanted to scream at her to just go home, but I couldn't because that would be wrong.

Mum never screamed at people that they should go home. Not even Aunty Portia and no one liked Aunty Portia and when she did go home she took half the leftovers with her if you weren't looking. I'd even seen Aunty Judith tell her to get lost, and Aunty Judith is actually her sister, but Mum never did.

I hoped Pam would never do that to me…but, I did paint her nails, like, all the time. So I was pretty sure she really liked me.

And I wanted to just go 'well, fuck it' and not do what Mum does and tell Yvetta she wasn't welcome here anymore, but I couldn't. And that sucked. Big-time.

I realised we were going to have to talk. Like, a proper grown-up talk. God, that sucked. It would have been easier to just whisper stuff to Chloe and hope that Yvetta got the message, but that was what we used to do, when we were kids and we're not kids anymore.

But if I was going to talk to Yvetta, I was going to have to find something for Chloe to do first. "Hey, Chloe, can you, um…like, go and check on Tray for me?" I asked. She was busy reading one of my books and lounging on my bed.

"Oh. OK...why?" Chloe asked.

"Um…just, well, you know…you have to watch him, or he, like, _does _stuff."

Chloe looked confused, and I realised I hadn't exactly described that really well, but then there wasn't really much to describe. I didn't really have a plan. Or an idea of why she needed to go and hang out with Tray.

But then Chloe suddenly looked like she'd realised something. "Oh!" she said. "Is he, like…_special_?"

"Oh, um. Well, Mum and Dad think so, so you know…" I stopped, I didn't really want to say that my brother was actually that kind of special…but if you knew Tray then it was probably a pretty good guess. I mean, he still didn't know that he wasn't supposed to just wander off all the time. There might be something wrong with him.

"OK, I can go and look after him" Chloe said, putting my book down.

"Great, just, um, talk about his Lego. He likes the Lego" I said as she left. I wondered if I should have warned her about the rubber band gun. Oh well. Most of us had only fallen for that one once.

"So what are we doing today?" Yvetta said, as she looked in my mirror and brushed her hair. "We could go to St Luke's? Do you think your dad will take us?"

"He took Sam to cricket" I pointed out.

"We could get the bus?" she suggested.

I tried to think of a tactful way to say she should go home. I thought about what Mum would do. Mum would offer her a cup of tea and sigh and look pained. I tried to think about what Dad would do. Usually he was pretty blunt, and sometimes he threatened like, really bad punishments. I didn't think a punishment would work, but maybe blunt would?

"You need to go home" I said, and Yvetta whirled around and gave me a look that she thought was, like, really supposed to make me feel bad. But it didn't. I was sick of her.

And then she burst into tears. "I can't face her!" Yvetta wailed.

OK, so Dad's method didn't work either. Crap, crap, crap.

I thought a bit more. Tray came into the room. "Your friend is sitting on my bed" he said, and he looked at me like he wanted me to fix it. I already had a problem to fix.

"She just wants to be friends" I told him. "Be nice. If you're nice I'll get you a biscuit."

"I don't want to be _nice"_ Tray complained.

"Two biscuits" I offered, while Yvetta pulled tissues out of the box. Seriously? Did she need to use all those tissues just for blowing her nose once?

"Three biscuits and some juice."

"Two biscuits and you can have the last of the chocolate milk" I said to him. It was really boring talking about food with Tray. I hoped that would be the end of it.

"OK" Tray said happily, and he wandered off.

And that just left me with Yvetta still. And I didn't know how to fix it. I needed a new plan, but so far what I'd tried wouldn't work, Mum's way would mean I was stuck with her, Dad's way just made her cry all over my stuff.

I thought about who else I knew. What would Nana do?

"You know, your mum's probably _really_ upset you're not at home" I tried.

"No she's not!" Yvetta said. "She's got Dylan and she doesn't want me, she wants him."

"Mmm, but if you were to go home, then she'd probably start to feel, like, really guilty about it all, and be so happy to have you back. I know that if it was _my_ mother, I'd want to be there to see her be, like, really apologetic and stuff…"

"Your mum has Eric!" Yvetta half-yelled at me. "That's what my mum says. She says your mum has Eric, and she doesn't know how much she lucked out, and now Mum has Dylan and I have…I have…I have no one…" Yvetta was really sobbing now. I kind of knew that she was mostly putting it on, but it was still pretty awful.

I handed her a tissue. One tissue, because that's all she should need. Tissues weren't that great for the environment, even if they did come from sustainable sources. I sighed. None of this was really working.

"Do you really think she would?" I asked Yvetta.

"Would what?" Yvetta said, sniffing. Grossly.

"Like, hook-up with Dylan?" I'd wanted to ask her since the day before, but Yvetta was so bloody sure that it had happened and she went on and on and on about it all, that no one else could really get a word in edgewise.

"She did" Yvetta said.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I said! I saw the text messages on her phone. And they're always talking and laughing when he picks me up."

"So?" I said. That didn't sound like a lot. "Did the text messages say what they'd been doing?"

"They said…they said…" I was a bit worried Yvetta wouldn't ever get to the point because she was sobbing again. "They said that he was looking forward to seeing her again because he had…he'd…he'd had a really good time with her." Yvetta covered her face with her hands. Ugh. She was going to end up with snot all over them.

I thought about it for a moment. "Did you ask her?" I asked. "Because when she rang last night she, like, didn't seem to know why you were here."

"No!" Yvetta said. "God, you don't get it! My life is _over_ and you're like, asking me all these stupid questions!"

I sighed. Yvetta was a huge freaking pain in the bum and it didn't look like anything was going to change that in a hurry.

And then Felicia walked in. "Do you know where the wheat bag is?" she asked.

I was about to answer when Yvetta turned to Felicia. "Do you mind?" she asked.

"No, I don't mind. Because I wasn't talking _to you_!" Felicia spat back. Great. This was going to go so freaking well, Felicia all over the place because her freaking hormones were making her anger issues worse, and Yvetta all upset because of the whole Dylan thing. No way was I getting in the middle of them.

"Oh my God!" Yvetta said. "Can't anyone get any privacy around here?"

"No! Because the house is full of people who won't bloody leave! Go home, Yvetta!"

"Shut up, Felicia!"

"Go to hell, Yvetta."

Felicia started to walk out of the room, but Yvetta followed her into the hallway and they continued arguing out there. I heard Dad come in the front door again, but he didn't come in to say hello. I couldn't blame him. Things in here were not going well.

I sat on my bed and looked at my books. Some of them were the ones I'd bought back from the States, from the house that Dad grew up in.

I tried to think about what to do with Yvetta. I didn't have an idea.

And then I did. You know, if you thought about it, this wasn't all that different from some of those books. OK, so I wasn't sure that really Dylan was Yvetta's one true love, because like, it was Dylan and he was not what you'd want to spend the rest of your life with. But maybe Yvetta would?

And I'd never read a book where, like, the hero sleeps with the mother…or someone thinks he does, because that is ick and Yvetta's not wrong about that.

But aside from that, it's like a classic misunderstanding. Because in those books there was _always_ a misunderstanding, and, if there wasn't, they'd get together in, like, three chapters. But they don't, they keep believing something that isn't true. Like in one I read, called _The Takeover_, the hero, who's, like, a CEO of this huge company thinks the heroine is really one of those people who spy on other companies, but she's not. That's her sister.

Or in _Heart's Desire's Long Journey_ there's this woman, who doesn't tell her boyfriend she's pregnant because she thinks he's having an affair, but really, he was planning a surprise proposal. And then she doesn't tell him about the baby. For five years! Luckily the five year old is all really cute and likes his dad and isn't like, really freaking bossy like Pam is.

And then there was the one where she thinks that he's trying to ruin her father's reputation at the hospital where they all work as doctors, but she finds out that her father has, like this disease that means he shouldn't be operating on people and he still was, which is pretty bad, and he could have killed someone, but the hero saves the patient which is good.

And when you think about it, in every one of those books they really should have all talked about it. None of the bad stuff would have happened if they had just asked a few simple questions, instead of running off and like, crying about it in a corner. Communication is the key, after all. And crying, well…I was over the freaking crying.

And then I realised that I had an actual plan. I nearly did a 'yay' to myself, but Yvetta came back into the room. "I can't believe your sister!" she said. "How do you live with her?" I shrugged. I was just used to it and, now she was past the cute stage, no one else wanted her.

"So, uh, I just need to, um…make a phone call…" I said.

"You sound funny. Are you going to call Riley?" Yvetta asked.

"Maybe" I said. Yvetta looked at me funny, and then Dad came in to tell me that he and Pam were going out. I wasn't really interested, not now I had my plan.

"So I'll be back in a moment" I said.

"I think it's rude just leaving me here" Yvetta muttered, but I left the room anyway. I ignored Tray yelling "I get my biscuits now!" at me as I walked down the hall, and I went into the kitchen where Felicia was eating all the biscuits anyway, and I rang Yvetta's house.

For a moment I wondered if Ana was out, and I thought that my plan wouldn't work, and then she answered and she sounded really groggy and I realised she'd probably worked the night before and she might be shitty with me for waking her up even though the morning was half-over and I'd had to get up at the crack of freaking dawn because I had younger kids to take care of.

"Hello?" Ana said. Well, it was more of a croak really. She sounded like an old lady.

"Um, hi! It's me. Amelia."

"Oh. Amelia. You girls have the nice pyjama party last night?"

"Oh, yes. We did. But hey, um, can you come and pick Yvetta up? Like now?"

"She want to come home already?" Ana asked.

"Yeah. She has, um, homework to do…" I hoped Ana believed me. Yvetta wasn't exactly like the best person in our school at well, anything. She wasn't swotty at all.

"She does?" Ana asked. Crap. Yeah, she didn't buy it.

"Yeah, and like, the book has to go back to the library…so?" I waited to see what she said next. After a pause she sighed. "Tell her I be there in half an hour. And tell her to be ready, I don't want to wait around, you know? I got to work again tonight."

"OK, no problem!" I said happily. And then I hung up. Boy, Ana was odd; she didn't even think it was odd that I'd rung and not Yvetta. Felicia did though.

"I don't know that Yvetta's going to leave" she said to me. "I think we're stuck with her, like we're stuck with you."

"Oh, shut up Felicia" I said, but I wasn't really too worried. After all, she'd had a tough night, what with her period coming and stuff.

"Maybe we could get Tray's rubber-band gun back for him? That might get rid of her" Felicia said.

"Do you know where that is?" I asked. Felicia was really nosey and liked spying on everyone.

"Top of the linen cupboard, by the flannelette sheets" Felicia said. Maybe she was useful for something, after all.

"Biscuits!" Tray yelled, as he ran into the room.

"Just, hang on Tray" I said.

"You promised!" he yelled. God, he was a pain in the bum, and I felt a bit sorry for Mum being stuck with him. Maybe he was the one we should be trying to give away?

"Give him two biscuits and no more" I said to Felicia and then Tray and Felicia said "You're not in charge!" almost at the same time, which was freaky. But really, if I wasn't, who was? And if no one was in charge, it would all go to hell around here. Things were getting pretty bad without Mum, and I didn't want them to get any worse.

"I get the chocolate milk too" Tray said.

"Tough luck. I drank it all" Felicia said, and Tray looked like he might do something to her. I hoped he didn't know where his rubber band gun was now.

I figured that maybe I didn't want to be in charge of Tray and Felicia at that moment and I went back to my room where I had to sit and listen to Yvetta wail on again, while Chloe tried to have a separate conversation about how bad tissues are for the environment. I freaking knew that! I wasn't the one taking them out of the box two at a time and blowing my nose only once before they went in the bin.

And then the doorbell rang. Thank God for that! That would be Ana. I went to answer it, and it wasn't Ana it was some kids selling chocolate bars for their school. I managed to get rid of them before Tray found out they were there, and went back to my room.

Luckily five minutes later Ana did arrive. "Is she ready?" she asked me. Boy, she looked bad, her hair was all tangled and she didn't really have any makeup on and her top wasn't that clean.

"Um…nearly..." I said, "Come in."

"Your mother here?" Ana asked me.

"Oh, um. She's popped out" I said. Well, I lied. But only because Dad had lied the night before, so I couldn't say she was at Piha, could I?

"Just your Eric here then?" she asked.

"Oh, he had to take my sister out…" Ana didn't seem that interested, so I left that one. We walked into my room and Yvetta whirled around and looked really upset. Also, really mad. I hoped she was still mad with Ana and not at me.

"I said I didn't want to TALK TO HER!" Yvetta shouted. No, she was mad at me. Crap.

"Why are you all being the snotty-madam?" Ana asked. "Amelia said you wanted to come home, so I got out of bed and I came here. Don't be a little cow now."

"I'm not the cow, you're the cow!" Yvetta said.

"Don't you talk to me like that!" Ana said. "If I'd talked to my mama like that, I'd be all knocked sideways. Cheeky, that's what you are."

"I'm not the bad person!" Yvetta said, and she sounded like she was going to cry again. "You're supposed to be my mother!" And then she looked like she was going to run from the room, which would really screw things up. I wished I'd thought to get Felicia to come and act as back-up, or maybe Tray. And his rubber band gun. But it was only me, in the doorway, to stop her.

"Stay here!" I said to Yvetta, and she stopped. "You have to talk to her."

"I DON'T WANT TO TALK TO HER!" Yvetta screamed. Chloe, who had been watching all of this, and looking really interested, actually looked a little scared now. I was more than a little scared.

I really wished I had that rubber band gun.

"But you have to!" I pleaded. "Or else this will go on and on and maybe you'll never talk to each other again then then, like, your mum, she won't get to know her grandchildren or anything!"

Ana gasped. "You're pregnant?" she asked Yvetta.

"No!" Yvetta said, turning around to face Ana again. "I'm not! But you probably are! And now, like, I'll get a new step-father and he'll be my ex-boyfriend because you slept with Dylan! And you hate me! And my life is SO unfair!"

"I did the what?" Ana asked, frowning.

"You hooked up with Dylan! I know you did, so don't lie to me! I'm not a baby and you're just a horrible person!"

"How dare you say such a thing!" Ana said. "I can't believe that you'd even think I'd do it! You're just making this up. That's what you do, you make up stories so everyone will think your life is so hard, and it's not, because you don't know what it was like for me, when I was back in the old country, and your real father left me, and I had to bring you up by myself, and even here, when I leave that Franklin, I have to work and work and work to buy you the nice things, and make sure you have what the other girls have, and this? This is what you do to me? You tell everyone I do terrible things behind your back and you know it's not true. You take it back!"

"No! It's true!" Yvetta wailed. She looked scared of Ana. I wondered if I should be scared too.

"Take it back!" Ana warned and she took a step closer to Yvetta. That made me a bit scared. Crap. This was way out of hand now and this wasn't communicating, this was violence. We really needed Dad and he wasn't here.

I had to do something. "Tell her you saw the text messages" I hissed to Yvetta.

"I did!" she said. "He sent you messages, all about how hot you were and how much he wanted to hook up again, and…oh, it was so gross! He thinks he's really lucky to have an older woman!" Yvetta looked really upset now, but Ana looked…well, she was giggling. Like, full-on giggling.

So weird.

"Oh, baby-girl" she said. "You got the wrong end of the wood" she said, and it took me a minute to figure out she meant stick. Boy, and I thought Dad spoke funny.

"No I haven't!" Yvetta said. "It said it was from Dylan on your phone!"

"It was from Luis" Ana said, and she sounded kind of proud. I looked at Yvetta, Yvetta looked really wide-eyed. "Luis at the bar?"

"Yes" Ana said. "The new waiter, the one from Argentina. He's a rugby player" she said. Well, he couldn't be much of one, if he was waiting tables at a bar in Kingsland, but maybe it wasn't the best time to point that out.

"But…but…you hooked up? With him?" Yvetta asked.

"Yes!" Ana said. "I get myself the toy-boy, like Amelia's mother. That Sookie, she knows what it's all about, yes?"

Oh, God no. I hoped the answer was no. As bad as it was hearing about Yvetta's mother's sex-life, thinking about my own mother's sex-life was way worse.

"But your phone said Dylan!" Yvetta accused. "So it must have been him!"

Ana shrugged. "I can't work that phone. I said to Franklin, I need a new one, but make it easy to use, and he didn't, and I can't figure it out, and when I tried to save his number it put it under Dylan and I don't know how to change it."

"Really?" Yvetta asked.

"Well, yes. That Dylan, well he's alright for you, I guess. But he's just a boy. No meat on him. Luis, he's got those big legs, like I like. He's a rugby player you know." I don't know why she kept saying that. Rugby players were boring, and looked like they didn't have anything to talk about. I wouldn't want a rugby player, I'd much prefer Riley.

"Oh, come here my little girl" Ana said, holding out her arms to Yvetta. "You just being the silly-billy, aren't you? Your mama, she'd never hurt you."

Yvetta sniffed. "No. But I just…I really thought…"

"Have more faith in me" Ana said. "You know what my taste is like; I wouldn't go after your Dylan."

"I guess."

"And maybe we can all go out sometimes, yes? You bring Dylan, I bring Luis and we have a nice meal."

"OK" Yvetta said, quietly.

"So. Now we go, so I can do my nails and my hair before I go to work tonight. Luis is working and I don't want him distracted by the girls who come in, do I?" She smiled at Yvetta.

"No" Yvetta said. "You don't."

This was all kind of weird. I was kind of glad Mum had found Eric when I was little and I didn't have to give her dating advice now…imagine if she wanted to double-date with me and Riley. I felt kind of odd at that image.

Yvetta gathered up her bag and stuff and said goodbye. "You tell your mother thanks for having her" Ana said to me. "And that I join her club now, OK? This being a cougar is pretty good!"

"Oh. OK" I said. No way was I saying that, but it didn't hurt to be polite. And then they left.

"Thank God for that" Felicia said, as she walked down the hall to the bathroom.

"Yep" I agreed, and I turned to go and talk to Chloe again, who, hopefully Yvetta and all her dramas had left, would now go home too.

I kind of wanted someone to high-five me or something, because really, I fixed that problem all by myself. With no help from anyone. But no one did. It felt pretty good though, being in charge, and knowing I'd fixed it all.

"What's for lunch?" Tray asked, as he came into the room.

"I don't know and I don't care" I said to him. I didn't want to be in charge all the time, though, because if I was, then there'd be nothing left for Dad to do.

Plus, it was freaking hard work.

**Thanks for reading!**


	54. Chapter 54

**A/N So, I was going to finish up the weekend with one big, long chapter, but have decided to split it. Rest assured, though, Sookie will be coming home!**

**And in toddler news, if anyone thinks have a chatty, articulate two and half yr old is heaps of fun, picture me at the supermarket this week, with the toddler in the shopping trolley (cart) talking to the bottle of glass cleaner she insisted she needed to hold. Her conversation with the glass-cleaner went like this (loudly): "Hello, Mr Poo-poo head. Nice to see you! Yes, you a poo-poo head! POOS!" Mmm. We got a few looks.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, and not the toddler's. If she was writing this all the characters would be named Mr Poo-poo head, so count yourself lucky I mostly keep her away from the keyboard :)**

EPOV

The trip to Spotlight with Pam was long and boring. First we had to look at the paint and glitter. Then we had to find cardboard for the sword that was, I was reliably informed by Pam herself, our project for the afternoon, and then we had to look at knitting patterns. Pam wanted my opinion on whether she'd be able to knit herself a shrug. Pam didn't believe me when I said I didn't know what a shrug was. What she failed to grasp was that I didn't care either.

I now knew what a shrug was. It was the most pointless garment in the entire fucking universe.

And then we moved on to Smiggle where I lost even more of my day trying to decide between neon gel pens versus…fuck, I don't know. Some other gel pens in slightly different colours. And whether erasers were better if they looked like lollipops or ice creams. And whether pink was better than purple. And whether pens really needed to be covered in glitter, or whether it was OK if they were rainbow-striped.

Eventually Pam allowed me to buy coffee as long as she got a hot chocolate too, and then we could finally leave the mall behind and go home.

"So you'll call Nana Lorena?" Pam asked me, from the back seat.

"What? Why?"

"Because I need to go round there. So she can cast-on for me. I can't cast-on by myself. Yet."

"Uh-huh. Maybe it would just be better to wait until you can, and knit the shrug-thing then?" I suggested.

"But I won't learn how to cast-on unless she shows me how!" Pam complained. She kind of had a point. But I wanted to drop the subject and move on. Preferably before I got stuck calling Lorena.

"So…you want a sword still?' I asked Pam.

"Yep! We'll do that when we get home. Straightaway when we get home!"

"After lunch." Maybe by then she would have forgotten anyway.

"What's for lunch?" Pam asked.

I didn't know. I hadn't really thought of that. "Um…something" I said. I was sure there would be food around. Sookie was always buying groceries, or that was what it felt like. And if I looked over the credit card statements I could pretty much get my confirmation of that fact.

The house seemed reasonably quiet when we got home. Ivan trotted up, panting happily. No one else was around. There was still a pile of everyone's shit in the hallway. Including, I noted, the bag Sam had taken to cricket. So at least he'd made it home.

Amelia came out. "I fixed everything" she announced. "But you have to do lunch, OK?"

"Um, OK." I wondered what she'd fixed. She just stood there looking at me.

"Look!" Pam shouted. "I got four new glitters!" Amelia rolled her eyes and walked off muttering.

Tray came out and looked forlorn. "Is it lunch now?" he asked. "I'm hungry!"

"It's lunch soon" I said, just as Amelia's voice boomed out from her bedroom. "You had all those biscuits!" she shouted.

"You only let me have two biscuits!" Tray shouted back, and then he turned back to me. "I only had two" he said, like he needed to be congratulated, or maybe commiserated with.

"Yeah, that's great Tray" I said to him.

"And now I'm starving!" he wailed, and then he looked around, waiting for someone to contradict him. No one did. Instead Pam looked at me. "I'm starving too Daddy!" she wailed.

"What about you Sam?" I asked him, as he walked past, still in his cricket uniform which was now more green and brown than white.

"Um…" he said, thoughtfully. "Um, I guess I'm a little hungry…"

Tray turned to him. "Did you get food?" he asked. Sam looked a little sheepish. "Callum's mum took us to Subway…" he said. "But I didn't have much."

"What did you have?" Tray asked.

"I don't think there are any scraps, Tray" I told him.

"But…Sam got food. And I didn't!"

"I played cricket you moron. I needed it."

"Amelia gave you food!" Tray yelled. "I saw that. Did you eat that too?"

Sam wisely decided not to answer that question. Felicia walked into the hallway, carrying an empty-looking bag of potato chips. "Why are you guys making such a big fuss over food?"

"Why are you eating all the chips? Again!" Tray wailed. Felicia shrugged.

"You'll get a fat bum!" Tray said, and then he took off at top-speed, expecting Felicia to follow him, I guessed. But instead she just stood there.

"That's a really horrible thing to say!" she said to the wall, because Tray wasn't standing there anymore.

"OK, so lunch is…um…" I didn't really have a plan for lunch. I walked into the kitchen. Everyone followed me, like I was the fucking pied-piper. It wasn't particularly helpful.

"Lunch is what?" Tray prompted.

"Lunch is whatever you want to make" I said. "I'm giving you guys free rein." I thought that would be a popular decision, given they always fucking complained about whatever Sookie offered them.

"So…we have to make our own lunch?" Tray asked, as if I'd asked him to go and invade a foreign country or something.

"I've seen you make a sandwich before" I said to him. I had. It wasn't always something you wanted to watch, especially not when he was trying to get cold baked beans to remain in place between two slices of bread, but he had done it before.

"But…" Tray looked around hopelessly.

"What kind of sandwich?" Pam asked.

"Whatever you want" I said to her.

"So…does that include having sprinkle sandwiches?" she asked.

"Well, it could. But I don't think that fairy bread shit is really going to fill you up."

"Is there no more food until dinner?" Tray asked, hurriedly.

"I never said that." They were always so fucking quick to jump to conclusions.

"What is for dinner?" Sam asked. That was another thing they were all quick at, wondering what was for dinner.

"Let's just have lunch first" I suggested.

"Dad doesn't know that _either_" Felicia said, kind of scathingly.

"I told you what was for lunch" I said.

"Yeah. But where's the bread? What's the choices? I don't know!" Felicia said.

"I'm sure you can figure it out. Try opening the fridge, or looking in the pantry." Felicia just rolled her eyes and stomped into the pantry muttering to herself.

Amelia walked in the room and watched her. "It's not easy being eleven" she said to me.

"Really, Ames? You should try being thirty-nine sometime." She just looked at me like I was an idiot again. But it really wasn't that much fun standing around here while they all asked me a bunch of questions about stuff they could probably figure out for themselves.

"There's no bread in here!" Felicia shouted into the room from the recesses of the pantry.

"I don't want crackers!" Tray wailed.

"What about toast?" Pam suggested.

"How? With no bread?" Sam said to her. Pam looked a bit chastened.

"You had Subway! I want Subway!" Tray yelled, first at Sam then at me.

"We're not getting Subway this time on a Saturday" I said to them. If you weren't there early, the queues were fucking horrific.

Felicia came back out of the pantry and glared at me. "Try the freezer" Amelia said.

"What?" Felicia asked.

"There'll be bread in the freezer. There's always bread in the freezer."

Felicia sighed and went into the laundry room where we could hear her rummaging around. Eventually she came back out with a loaf of frozen bread which she put unceremoniously on the table. Everyone just looked at it.

"Oh for God's sake!" Amelia muttered, and then she took the loaf, pulled out half the slices and put them in the microwave. Then she walked over to the refrigerator and started pulling out various containers before she put them on the table.

"Can I…um, can I have one of those chocolate yoghurts…?" Tray asked, peering into the open refrigerator, and trying to get past Amelia to get closer.

"Absolutely not" Amelia said, as she pushed the door shut. That was so fucking weird. I didn't know when exactly Amelia had turned into Sookie, but it looked like it had happened when I wasn't fucking looking.

And then something occurred to me. "Where's, uh…the others?" I asked.

"Oh" Amelia said, as she took the bread out of the microwave, and put it on the table. "Dig in!" she said, and the other kids all started helping themselves which was a relief because I really didn't want to have to go to fucking Subway.

Amelia came to stand beside me. "Yvetta went home, and then Chloe did too" she said, and then she smiled at that.

"Really?" I asked. "And that was, um…OK?" I didn't want Yvetta to stay, but I wasn't convinced that going home was the best thing for her. It was an awkward situation and I really fucking wished it wasn't something I had to deal with.

Although had Amelia actually dealt with it? Maybe I didn't have to?

"Oh, yeah" Amelia said. "Turns out that it was mostly just a miscommunication, and, like, Yvetta and Ana just needed to sit down and talk it out. Plus, Ana can't work her phone. I mean, she's, like, worse than Mum who always makes Felicia figure it out for her. So they made up and Ana's not interested in Dylan, because she's, like, going out with this guy from her work that's Argentinian and plays rugby, so I guess working in a bar near Eden Park seemed like a good idea. To him. I don't know why, though. And Chloe left because she got bored, I think. Also, she wanted to, like, do something with the worm farm she has. She has a worm farm. It's kind of gross, but you can't tell her that because she tells you why it's like, so much better to have one and I don't want her know that we don't. Tray might eat one of the worms, for a start. Or put it in Pam's bed and make her cry…hey, did we ever find the weta?"

I shook my head for no. Fuck. Amelia could talk. By the time she got onto to the stuff about the worms, I'd totally lost interest. Who the fuck really cares about worms?

Still Yvetta wasn't here. And I hadn't evicted her. And it sounded as though Amelia thought it was OK. Maybe I could just trust Amelia's judgement and move on.

That sounded like a plan. Next plan was to have some lunch, and then do some work.

"Daddy!" Pam said. "Look, I'm having Marmite and chips in my sandwich!"

"That's nice, Pam" I told her. It was fucking weird really, but you couldn't blame the kids when they had Sookie as a role-model.

"And after I've eaten, we're making my sword! Right, Daddy?"

"Pam's getting a sword?" Tray asked, with his mouth full, so it came out as "Pum's gthin a sorf?"

"Cardboard" I said to him.

"Stink" he informed me. It was nice to have short, to the point conversations sometimes. At least I knew where I stood with Tray.

Once they'd eaten pretty much everything Amelia had put out and left a huge fucking mess all over the table, most of the kids disappeared. Even Amelia. I guessed she was happy enough to put food out, but not really as enthusiastic about cleaning up what everyone left behind.

I wasn't either, I decided. I did my best to get rid of all the trash and the stains, but having Pam there asking me if I was done yet every twenty seconds wasn't really conducive to getting a lot done.

At least that was what I was going to say if anyone asked why I'd done a shit job. But no one did. I was a little sad at that.

"So, here's the cardboard" Pam said, laying it out on the clear space we'd made on the table. "Draw it."

"Draw what?"

"The sword! Daddy, you have to draw it, then we'll cut it out, then I'll decorate it. OK?" Pam looked at me expectantly.

"Um…how come I have to draw it?"

"Because you're giving me the sword!" Pam looked at me indulgently. She clearly thought I was playing dumb.

Well, I wasn't exactly dumb. But I didn't really understand all her rules about who did what, either. And why I always got the shit jobs.

I'd just finished the third version of the sword, which had finally met with Pam's approval, when Felicia came into the kitchen. "Is that it?" she asked.

"Yes!" Pam said enthusiastically. "But it will look better when I put glitter on it. I'm going to stick this really big jewel right here, so it looks as though there's a ruby in it, then I'm going to mix just a tiny bit of the red glitter with some of the gold glitter and use that in a line down the middle. Then I'm…"

"Great" Felicia said, in a voice that was kind of flat. She hadn't really seemed herself since, well, since she'd started her period. She didn't seem to be enjoying it. Maybe no one did? I didn't know and it wasn't something you could ask…well, sometimes Sookie volunteered things. But it was a little scary thinking she'd crossed an invisible line and I couldn't follow her there. And granted, Amelia seemed to be doing OK these days…actually, Amelia seemed to be fucking usurping Sookie's position and I expected fireworks when the two of them had to share the same space again, but Felicia…Well. Felicia just seemed off her game.

And I could do shit all about that.

Felicia sat down at the table and surveyed our work. Pam was busy positioning the big stick on jewel things she'd bought at Spotlight and wanted to have all over the sword.

"Remember they'll stick into your hand" I said to her.

"What?" she asked me.

"Those" I said, pointing to them. "They'll stick in if you put them all over the handle, then you won't be able to grip it properly."

"Oh" Pam said, and she started moving them around. "What about there?"

"That's probably better" I said. As long as you didn't mind the fact that he sword would glint so fucking much that everyone would see you coming from a mile away. Maybe that was the point, and Pam just intended to blind people?

How much damage could she do with a cardboard sword anyway?

"Don't actually try to kill anyone with it" I said to her.

Pam rolled her eyes. "No. I'm not going to hit anyone with it, because it would ruin it." Well, that was something, although she probably had other ways she intended to hurt her brothers.

Felicia was still sitting there, just watching. And then finally she spoke up. "Can I have one?" she asked, in a voice which didn't make her seem much older than Pam herself.

"Sure" I said, and I pulled another piece of cardboard towards me.

"Actually" Felicia said, "Give that to me. I don't want a lame-o girly one like you gave Pam." I passed Felicia the cardboard. Maybe she wasn't totally lost yet.

SPOV

Eventually Tara got out of bed and staggered out to join me on the deck. "Afternoon" I said, looking at her as she sat down, rather gingerly, on the sun-lounger next to mine.

"Fuck off" she said.

"You're that good, huh?" I said, trying to hide how crappy I felt myself. The coffee had helped a bit. As had some water, the painkillers and the fresh sea air but even so. How the hell had Eric ever managed to go out and get shit-faced on a regular basis and still look so good?

Well for one thing, he hadn't been forty-five when he did it. That would have helped. I wasn't sure I wanted to go near a mirror at the moment. It would just be too unpleasant.

"You know, we don't have to sit out here. Where it's so bloody bright" Tara grumbled to me.

"Stop complaining and go and get your sunnies. I'm on holiday and I'm bloody well enjoying the view."

"God, you're bitchy when you're hung-over" Tara grumbled. She sat there for a bit. "Get them for me. Please?" she whined.

"No way. I am totally off duty and you are not my responsibility" I said to her. Apart from the fact that I felt a bit crappy it had been nice sitting there, with no one coming to ask me a hundred questions about what they should be doing, or what they could eat, or telling me what one of their siblings had been doing, or not doing. It had been nice.

It had also been a little lonely. I was glad that Tara was up.

Although she wasn't much company because she dragged her chair into the shade and then just sat there with her eyes closed. After a while I was pretty sure she'd nodded off again and I was stuck with nothing to do but watch the activity on the beach. There seemed to be some kind of completion for all the surf lifesavers going on down there. Lots of flags were set out on the sand and there were people running in and out of the water. We were so far up the hill, though, that they all looked like tiny toy people and I had no chance of actually figuring out who was doing what, let alone who was winning.

So I watched the toy people, and I watched the surf. I looked at the people moving about in the camping ground which was between the beach and the road at the bottom of the hill. It wasn't that full at this time of year, but there were a few people leisurely strolling around. A couple of kids with their boogie boards under their arms and a dad with them who was trying to get them to stop crashing the boards into each other. That made me feel a little homesick actually.

After about fifteen minutes I woke Tara up. "If you don't get up your legs'll get burnt" I warned her.

"Wah? Oh" she said. "You know once upon a time you would have just told me to roll over and do the other side."

"I know" I agreed. "But all those once upon a times are now indelibly etched all over my body and are not pretty to look at."

Tara sighed. "At least you didn't get big dark marks on your face when you were pregnant. I never got rid of some of that pigmentation."

"No, but I have some stretch marks in really odd places instead" I said. "Come on, let's go inside."

"Yes, Mum" Tara mumbled.

"Be thankful you got fifteen minutes" I said to her. "If you'd been Pam you'd have got about two, and that's even with sunscreen on."

"She is very pale" Tara said.

"Yep" I agreed. "She is."

We scrounged through the groceries we'd brought with us and made some toast. I wasn't up to eating anything more substantial. And then after we'd eaten, and done the clean-up which took all of about five minutes, we just sat. And read our books. And occasionally talked.

It was quiet. It was peaceful. It was really, really odd.

I tried to figure out what it would be like at home. I hoped they were all coping without me. I checked my phone but there weren't any text messages, so I could only assume Eric had it all under control.

EPOV

I could tell the minute Sam and Tray got back from the park because of the shouts of "Fuck off, Pam!" So much for not using the sword on her brothers.

Sam ran past the open doorway, with Pam in hot pursuit, and Tray and Ivan bringing up the rear. Ivan's excited barking just added to the commotion really, and when the whole party ran into Stan and growls and howls from him were added in to the mix, I really fucking wished that my office was sound-proof.

"Don't kill anyone, Pam" I called out.

"She couldn't do anything" Tray taunted. "It's just a girl's sword…Ow! Stop that! Daaaad! Make her stop!"

"You brought that on yourself Tray" I yelled out to him.

"How come she gets a sword and I'm not allowed my gun?" Tray asked.

"You don't need a gun in a sword-fight Tray."

"What?"

"Never mind."

"She's still doing it" Sam called out. "Tray's got a big red mark on his leg now."

"Tray's fine" I yelled out.

"I'm fine" Tray agreed. "But…shit, that hurts Pam!"

"Well DON"T BE MEAN!" Pam screamed at him.

"OW!" Sam yelled.

"Don't just watch Tray getting hurt!" Felicia yelled at Sam.

"Don't hurt me just because he's a moron. Fuck! How come you've got a sword too? Dad? Why's Felicia got one?"

"She made one" I yelled back. I wondered if all our conversations would be at this volume from now on.

"For God's sake, shut up all of you! I'm trying to study!" Amelia yelled.

"Stop pretending you're in charge, Amelia. You're not in charge!" Was it weird that I was happy that Felicia was yelling at Amelia again?

"Stop acting like a bunch of idiots!" Amelia shouted. "You're not in some kind of war! Ow! Don't you dare do that Felicia!"

"Or what?" Felicia said.

"Or I'll tell Mum!" Amelia yelled.

"So you admit you're not Mum?" Felicia called back.

"Shut up, Leesh!" Amelia yelled at her.

Strangely, it was actually kind of comforting to have things back to normal. Eventually the noise of the battle died down and I was actually able to do some work. That lasted only until the battle came to me.

Tray ran in first, followed by Sam in hot pursuit. "You shut up!" he said to Tray, while Tray tried to dodge the blows.

"But you like her!" Tray said, from under the arms he was using to cover his head.

"No I don't!" Sam said, trying to grab the back of Tray's shirt to make him stay still.

"But you talked to her!"

"I didn't have a choice!"

"What the fuck is going on?" I asked. I'd been trying to ignore them, but the back of my chair had just taken a heavy knock as someone had staggered into it so I was really going to have to give up the pretence that they weren't actually in the room with me, and that Sam wasn't trying to kill Tray, or, at least, punish him severely for some perceived slight.

"Sam…likes…" Tray started.

"Shut up!" Sam said. He was really angry with Tray. This couldn't be good.

"That girl!" Tray finished.

"What girl?" I asked, and Sam tried to push Tray into the futon which nearly knocked over the papers I had stacked there. Temporarily.

"Fuck, guys. Watch out!" I warned them.

"That Kayla" Tray said, as he dodged past Sam and tried to wedge himself between the desk and the bookcase. Well, I wasn't fucking protecting him. I did though, hold out an arm to stop Sam charging straight at him. Mainly to stop any innocent paperwork buying it.

"Who's Kayla?" I asked.

Sam stood there and frowned at me, like he wanted me to take back the question. Tray giggled to himself from his spot by the wall. I hadn't been all that curious to start with, but the fact that Sam didn't want to answer, just made me wonder.

"From down the road" Tray whispered.

"The Furnans" Sam said sullenly. "She's the one who I saw when I went to get Ivan back yesterday. She must have followed us down there when we walked down the road."

"Because she likes you!" Tray said, and Sam glared at him.

"No she doesn't. She just…I don't know. She's ten." He sounded like that was the end of the matter.

"Well there's nothing wrong with older women, Sam" I said to him.

"Shut up!" he yelled, and then he looked a bit shocked, probably realising he'd yelled at me and not Tray.

Tray decided to clarify my point though. "Mum's older than Dad" he said. "And Dad likes her. Remember that time we heard Aunty Portia say that he was clearly all over her all the time and no wonder she'd had all those babies? And then she thought it was stink that that other guy had died. He's the one you killed, eh Dad?"

Tray really wasn't helping matters. "No" I said.

"Oh... Yeah. That's what we say, eh Dad?" Tray ginned at me conspiratorially. Fuck. I hoped he never got called up as a witness for my defence.

"I didn't even want to talk to her" Sam said, sadly.

"Yeah. Ivan likes their dog, though, eh? Killer" Tray said nodding. "So we had to go over to get Ivan back."

"Killer?" I asked.

"He's a Staffy" Sam elaborated. "I think they're friends…you know. Killer and Ivan. Not me and Kayla."

"I think Ivan might be gay" Tray said. "Is Ivan gay, Dad?"

"No! We had him neutered. He's not really anything" I said. It didn't seem to stop him sniffing every other fucking dog that came his way, but I was pretty sure in the dog-world, that was standard greeting.

"So that's like you now" Tray informed me. "'cos Mum got you fixed." He gave a little shudder. "That just seems really weird."

"No! Not like that" I said. They hadn't really got the vasectomy thing, and Sookie had apparently tried explaining it to them on the day when I'd been in bed. She'd said Tray had only half-listened and Sam had acted like she'd had a great burden lifted from her. I wasn't really sure what he thought actually happened after a vasectomy, but Sookie had got the impression he thought there was no more sex. Ever.

Amelia hadn't really cared, Felicia had looked in turn worried and then a bit amused as she'd watched me hobble about and Pam had spent a long time sitting next to me in bed checking that it absolutely, positively meant there were going to be no more babies and we weren't just going to go and buy one somewhere if we changed our minds.

We weren't changing our minds.

"OK, so upshot is Sam's not interested in his not-so-secret admirer and Tray, you need to shut the fuck up and mind your own business, OK?"

Tray sighed. "I didn't do anything. I just said…"

"Nope. Not interested now. No more fighting though, OK?"

They nodded and walked off. I pretended I couldn't hear the scuffle starting again at the end of the hallway. Fuck. It was never-ending.

But before I knew it they had other concerns. "I'm hungry!" Tray announced, coming into the office again. I briefly wondered whether I needed to install a guard at the door.

"That's nice, Tray" I said.

"What's for dinner?"

"Um…pizza." I was pretty sure it was OK to have a night off cooking. Not that I'd been cooking on the other nights, of course, but Sookie usually had a night off at the weekend. So we'd do it to honour her memory. Or something like that.

"So…have you ordered it?" Tray asked.

"No. Because I'm working. Anyway, you guys can order it. Get Felicia to do it on her phone or something."

Tray ran off, and came back a few minutes later with the usual complaint that whoever was ordering wanted to pick all the flavours. I just had to finish an email, so I didn't really care. As long as someone ordered some pizza to arrive at some time, we'd be fine.

Tray left again. Sam came in next. I braced myself for another complaint about menu choices but instead he said "You better come. Mum's on TV!"

**A/N Staffy is short for Staffordshire terrier.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	55. Chapter 55

**A/N So yes, this was supposed to be the chapter that finished off the weekend, but there will be one more to go...I think. Basically, I wouldn't believe me anymore either. Unless you're the toddler and I'm telling you that we ran out of biscuits so don't ask for a second one. Then you should _definitely_ believe me.**

**Disclaimer: Good thing they don't have return dates like library books.**

SPOV

After a while, even reading your book without constant interruptions can get a little boring. Only a little, but enough that I wanted to get out and do something. "Do you want to go for a walk?" I asked Tara.

"Um…" she said, twisting around to look out through the doors that led to the deck. "Um…where?"

"Oh, down to the beach?" I suggested.

"I'm not climbing Lion Rock" Tara said, grumpily.

"No. That would be a bit stupid" I agreed. I was restless, not a masochist. "We could walk around the rocks to the next bay?" I suggested.

"Nhnn. I think the tide's in" Tara said, standing up to get a better look down at the beach. "The lagoon is looking pretty full." She stepped through the doors and onto the deck. "It looks really busy down there" she said.

"We could go down and have a look?" I suggested. I just needed…well, something that was slightly more exciting than sitting here waiting to see if Tara nodded off before she finished the _House & Garden_ magazine she was flicking through.

"I think it's just surf-lifesavers" Tara said, dismissively.

"Well, we could go for a walk, and then have a look at what's happening and get fish and chips for an early dinner and eat them on the dunes?"

Tara looked at me. "Whose time-table are you on that you want to eat before 6pm?"

I nearly said Tray's, which was probably true. "We didn't have lunch" I pointed out. "And by the time we've walked around a bit we will have worked up an appetite."

Tara sighed. "Do I need sunblock?" she asked me.

"I'm going to let you decide that one." I might have felt the need to be doing something, but that didn't mean I wasn't still off-duty for other people's problems.

We gathered up hats and sunglasses and I stuck my debit card in my bra. Tara locked the bach and then realised she didn't have anywhere to put the key, so I stuck that in my bra as well. Tara gave me a funny look.

"See?" I said. "The storage facilities make up for the danger of over-balancing."

"Um. OK" Tara replied. Yeah, I wondered how much she actually remembered of the previous night's conversation anyway.

We walked down the driveway to where it met the road, and then continued on, crossing over to the camping ground. Walking past the tents and caravans that were there made me nostalgic for the holidays I'd had as a kid with Mum and Dad. I missed the lifestyle as much as anything; everyone living in everyone else's pockets, kids running around the place while mums washed dishes in small buckets of water and tried to make dinner on gas stoves. OK, maybe it wouldn't be quite as good now I was an adult and I'd be one of the mums, but I still thought it could be fun.

If I could just convince Eric, of course. He still wasn't keen on the idea. Maybe I'd just go camping with the boys.

I realised that we'd reached the lagoon and I'd spent the whole time deep in thought, pondering the possibility of a camping trip. It was weird to walk around so lost in my own little world. Tara didn't need to keep up a constant conversation with me and no one was fighting, or complaining or asking for food or wandering off. It was nice. Even if it made me feel a little bit weird.

"It's very quiet" I said to Tara.

"It's not over there" she said, pointing to the beach where the whatever-it-was was taking place. "I think there's some Australians." Sure enough, you could hear several voices chanting "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie."

We walked around the lagoon and over to the beach in front of the surf life-saving clubhouse. Close-up the activity was even more frantic than it had seemed when we'd watched it from the deck. There were lanes made up with flags down the beach and people running in and out of the water in what looked like a relay race.

"I wonder if we're winning" I asked Tara, and she shrugged. I couldn't even figure out how you'd tell. We found a spot near the dunes and watched for a while. People were yelling out the names of the competitors, at least, that's what I assumed they were doing. Off in the distance I could see a guy with one of those big TV cameras balanced on his shoulder. Must be something fairly important then.

"I feel kind of bad" Tara said, after a while.

"Why?" I asked.

"Well. Perving at all these blokes in their Speedos. I'm old enough to be their mum."

Yeah. We were. Although I hadn't been perving. At least, I was pretty sure I hadn't been. I'd been watching the race. It wasn't my fault they were all wearing tiny swimwear.

"Don't perv then" I said to Tara.

"Jeez, Sookie. You take all the fun out of it" Tara pouted. "He's alright. Look, that one."

"Well, he's alright" I conceded.

"He's tall. You like tall blokes" Tara told me. "Admit it, you think he's nice."

"Apparently I like tall _guys_" I said to Tara. "And he's alright…he might be one of the Australians though, are they colour-coded?"

"I don't think all the Polynesian guys are necessarily ours, Sookie."

"No! I meant the swimwear. Are they wearing team colours?"

"Oh. Yeah. You could be right; he's in yellow after all."

"Lots of them are in yellow. It's kind of confusing" I said. "I guess it's a safety colour though."

"Mmm" Tara said, gazing off into the distance. I sighed. It was like we'd reverted to being sixteen again, watching guys from afar and daring each other to talk to them. We never did. The only one we ever really talked to was JB, and that had mostly just worked out for Tara.

Me, well. I'd waited and waited and waited for someone to come along who wanted me and eventually someone had. Bill. And I had been thrilled about that, and more than happy to sit back and let him do the pursuing.

I looked around the crowd. Further down the dunes I could see a group of teenage girls, excitedly calling out the names of the guys I guessed they'd come to watch. One of the boys in the team came over to the group and a girl broke ranks and threw herself at him enthusiastically. Where did they get all this confidence from, these girls? Why hadn't I been like that?

And though I knew it was stupid to regret the actions of thirty years before, I wished I'd been different. Wished I'd had an ounce of the confidence my daughters did.

"Spare change, ladies?" said a voice next to me. I turned and there was one of the life-savers, wearing nothing but his Speedos and shaking a bucket at me.

"Oh" I said. "I've only got my eftpos card." Without thinking I pulled it out to show him. I don't know why, but it always made me feel bad if I couldn't help out people collecting for charity. And surf life-saving was important; they saved people from drowning out here, every day. I'd be happy if no one ever drowned again; it was a terrible death from what I knew and it killed me that's how my parents had died.

I looked at Tara and she was rolling her eyes. "Key still in there?" she asked.

"Oh, yeah" I said, putting the card back. The guy collecting money was still standing there. "Sorry" I said to him.

"Oh, that's alright" he said. "We've had a pretty good day." He held the bucket up and shook it to demonstrate how good his day had been. "And we've had some pretty good results."

"Have we?" I asked. "Um…we've only just come down to watch."

"Yeah" he said. "The earlier races weren't so good, but we just beat the Aussies."

"Huh" I said. "Well, that's always good to hear. Did, um, did you compete?" That was possibly a mistake because it set him off on a long discussion of his rotator cuff injury, complete with a portion when he put down the bucket to demonstrate the flexibility he'd lost in his right arm because of it. "I'm OK in the boat" he said. "As long as I don't have to haul anyone in unaided, but I'm stuffed in the water at the moment, eh?"

"Yeah" I said, wondering if he had anyone else he should be collecting from. I could see that the group of teenage girls further on were watching him and clearly discussing him behind their hands. I figured if he went down that way he was sure to add to what was in the bucket.

"Well, maybe it'll heal in time for the next competition" I suggested, and that was a mistake again because I got the news that he wasn't going to make it to Surfer's for the return match with the Aussies. He sounded pretty bitter about it.

"Well, that's a shame" I said in the end.

"Yeah, and it's stuffed me for cricket too" he mused.

"Oh, my son just started playing cricket!" I said, happy to have something to add to the conversation. "I haven't found out how his game went this morning though."

The guy with the bucket looked me up and down. "How old's your son?" he asked me.

"Nine" I said.

"That's her middle child" Tara added in. "She has five."

"Wow" the guy said. "That's a lot of kids."

"Mmm" I said. "I'm used to it. It's really quiet without them all here, though."

"OK. Well, I better get back to collecting!" he said, and then he started walking back along the beach. I turned to say something to Tara and found she was giggling. "What?" I asked.

"Oh, you are so hopeless. That kid was trying to pick you up."

"No, he wasn't. He was just chatting."

"Yeah, right. Of course he was. While getting you to inspect his shoulder and other body parts."

"I was not looking below the waist Tara." Yeah, those Speedos were a worry. "Anyway, you know me. I'll talk to anyone."

"Well, yes. But you looked really bloody uncomfortable the whole time. It's a wonder you ever figured out Eric was interested in you. Tell me, what did he have to do to get your attention?"

Turn up at my house and pass out drunk on my couch, apparently. But I wasn't going to say that to Tara. "Well, you know. It's different. With Eric. I mean that kid…he reminded me of _Sam_. I wanted to tell him to put a t-shirt on because it's starting to get a bit nippy."

Tara grinned at me. "You're a worry" she said. "But why didn't that sort of thing happen to us when we were their age?" she nodded over to the teenage girls.

"I know" I said. Although in all honesty, at sixteen I would have been sitting far up on the dunes waiting for…well. Waiting for the perfect guy to come and get me. It had taken me a while to figure out that actually I could talk to anyone, and I wasn't as reserved as I thought I was.

And it was only in later life that I'd figured out that I wasn't the shy one, my Mum had been. And she's covered up her nervousness in social situations with a whole bunch of rules about not being a nuisance to people, and not making a fuss in public and I'd adhered to those rules with a far greater rigidity than was perhaps good for me. Scared of making a fuss, of being a problem, and content to sit and watch the world go by. Well, maybe not content, but certainly I was just waiting and waiting and eventually Bill turned up and he actually bridged the gap and he was just the thing I was certain I'd been waiting for.

Boy, you could get really introspective when no one had a melt-down because it was nearly dinner-time.

"Shall we go and get our fish and chips?" I said to Tara. "Before they get a backlog of orders as everyone leaves the race." The crowd was starting to thin out now.

"Yep" she said. "I'm getting a milkshake too."

"I thought milk didn't agree with you?"

"Yeah, but I'm off the wine tonight, so I have to indulge somehow" Tara said. "Plus, I like the ones here. It means summer holidays if I'm having a milkshake."

"For me it's always Schweppes Sparkling Duet" I said, as we walked over the dunes. "Jason and I used to drink bottles and bottles of the stuff when we were camping, it's the only time we were allowed it. It's about 10 per cent sugar and 80 per cent chemicals and food colouring, I think."

"Sounds pretty good" Tara said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "Hope they've got some."

EPOV

I walked out of the study, leaving a trail of glitter behind me. As predicted the loose glitter all over my desk had stuck to me while I was working. And then I realised that the glitter I was dropping was just adding to the glitter already in the hallway; presumably that had been shaken off Pam's sword when she'd been hitting her brothers with it. Fuck, the hallway looked like a pigsty now and Sookie had only been gone for just over 24 hours.

I hoped the fact she was making an appearance on the evening news wasn't something bad. Surely if they'd crashed on the road out to Piha they would have found the car yesterday? Unless it had rolled down a bank…and, fuck. There were too many possibilities.

I walked into the family room and Sam was standing there, holding the Sky remote. "I'll have to rewind it" he said, "She was only on for a second." He rewound the news program they were currently showing and sure enough, part-way through an item about some fucking race they were having out at Piha which looked like it was being contested entirely by extras from fucking _Baywatch_. And not the good extras either.

There was Sookie, with Tara at least, standing talking to a guy wearing one of those ridiculous swimming costumes, and…fuck. She pulled something out of her bra to show him. And you could fucking see exactly where that made the kid look.

Tara was no better. She was ogling the guy like there was no fucking tomorrow. I prayed that Sookie would fucking keep her eyes up, and she did. Thank fuck for that small mercy. Well she did up until the shot cut-away to go back to some more of the race and a reporter standing in the sand dunes.

"See?" Sam said. "Mum was there. With _that_ guy." He sounded displeased at that.

"Yeah, d'you think she knows him?" Tray asked.

"How?" I asked Tray. Tray shrugged. "Is the pizza here yet?" he asked. No one answered him.

Felicia spoke next. "He was quite good-looking…" she said, and then she blushed.

"Who was?" Amelia asked, arriving in the room. So we had to rewind the Sky feed again and show her.

"Huh" she said. "That guy, he was, like, _talking_ to Mum."

"Well, duh!" Felicia said.

"Shut up! You like him, anyway!" Amelia cried.

"Shut up yourself!" Felicia yelled back at her.

"Everyone. Shut the fuck up" I said. And then I took the Sky remote out of Sam's hands and re-wound the news footage again myself. I couldn't quite figure it out…I mean, what the fuck were they talking about?

"Maybe he wanted to know if she had food? Mum usually has food. I talk to her when I need food" Tray said. There was a definite theme to his musings. Not for the first time I realised that if we ever wanted Tray to leave home I'd have to fucking leave a trail of cheeseburgers up the driveway and along the street and hope like fuck he found someone that would take him in when the cheeseburgers ran out.

"Mum doesn't put food in her bra" Pam said. "She puts her card in her bra."

"And her keys" Felicia added.

"Sometimes money, like coins and things" Sam said. "And they're warm when she gives them to you." He looked disturbed at that memory.

"Once there was a hairbrush" Amelia said. "Just a little one though."

"I think that was a comb" Felicia said.

"No it was definitely a hairbrush" Amelia retorted.

"Whatever!" Felicia said, rolling her eyes. I wondered how we'd ended up listing the contents of Sookie's bra at any given point in time. I re-wound the footage again.

"He's got one of those buckets" Pam said. "Like they have when they're collecting money."

"And Dad says we're not paying for other people to get dogs when we have Ivan" Felicia added.

"But Ivan isn't a seeing-eye dog" Pam added.

"Ivan's gay" Tray informed her.

"No he's not!" Sam said. "You're gay."

"You're mental" Tray said. "And gay. You're a gay mental!"

"Alright. Shut up!" I tried. But listening to the footage didn't tell me anything at all. It was just a voiceover about the race and the amount of people who'd attended and how much the Australian participants had apparently enjoyed coming here.

I re-wound it again.

Amelia sighed. "You don't even know what gay means" she said to her brothers.

"Yeah! Like Ivan!" Tray yelled at her. "He keeps sniffing Killer's bum. That's gross. I don't want to sniff anyone's bum. I'm not gay!"

"That's not _all_ it is" Amelia murmured, but Tray ignored her. "How long until the pizza gets here?" he whined.

"Soon" I said, although I had no fucking idea. I hadn't ordered any. I hoped someone else had.

"Well, I have to go and get ready" Amelia said. "Riley's coming soon."

"You mean Riley's _dad_ is getting here soon!" Felicia yelled to her retreating back.

"I like Riley's dad" Tray said. "He's a cop."

"So?" Felicia said to him.

Tray shrugged. "That's kind of cool."

"He doesn't get a light-sabre you know." Felicia informed him.

"I've got a sword" Pam threw in. No one really cared.

"She doesn't do anything" Felicia said to me, as I was watching Sookie again. "She just stands there, chatting. She always chats. And she grabs something out of her bra. It's not news." Felicia left the room.

"Do you think she likes him?" Sam asked me.

"Who the fuck knows, Sam?" I replied. "But she doesn't even know him. I think he was just asking her for money."

"I guess she didn't have any coins in there" Sam said. "This time." He left the room as well.

"Daddy! Can we watch a movie? And eat pizza while we do it? On the bed?"

"No, Pam."

"Daaaady! We won't make a mess!"

"Yes, you will. So, no. The answer is no."

"But…"

"No, Pam."

And then it was just me, still watching Sookie on the screen. Sookie standing on the black sand at Piha. Fishing something out of her bra. Just like she had the day of our civil union when she'd pulled my wedding ring out of her bra.

I looked down at my ring. I missed Sookie and seeing her on TV just made it worse somehow. It didn't look like she was missing us. And it was only one day anyway. One incredibly long and tiring day. And the day wasn't over yet.

"Pizza guy's here!" Tray screamed excitedly from the hallway. Fuck, the poor delivery guy was probably deaf now.

"Dinner!" I yelled as I walked into the kitchen, hoping that got everyone coming in the right direction.

Tray staggered in carrying several pizza boxes. "Fuck" I said. "How much did Amelia order?"

"No, I ordered it" Felicia said, walking in. "Hey, did you know they've given a name to that one you made up at Hell Pizza? I think it's called Evil Empire."

"Ha. Funny, Leesh."

"Yeah, not so much when Ivan ate one of the pieces last time. Chilli doesn't agree with him."

"Can we eat now?" Tray practically screamed. And then the doorbell rang.

I could hear Amelia answer it, and I assumed she was about to leave with Andy. I started to go to say hello to him, when she walked back in. Carrying more pizza boxes. "The pizza arrived…oh" she said. "But…I ordered it?"

"No!" Felicia said. "I ordered it. Tray said someone had to do it."

"Tray told me I had to do it" Amelia said. "Because no one was organising dinner."

"Well, there was no dinner!" Tray said, eating a slice of pizza out of a box he'd opened. "And it was dinner time!"

"Oh my God!" Amelia said. "Can you ever think with anything other than your stomach, Tray?"

The doorbell rang again. "That'll be Riley" Amelia said.

"You mean Andy" Felicia added.

"Whatever!" Amelia said, walking over to me. "Hey, Dad…" she began.

"Yeah, I remember" I said to her. I walked into the bedroom to get my wallet and when I came back into the kitchen Sam was standing there, holding some more pizza boxes. He looked at the pizza already on the table. "Fuck" he said.

"Yep" I agreed. "But I can guarantee you guys I know what lunch tomorrow is going to be." I handed some money to Amelia. "Thank you!" she said brightly.

"Whaf?" Tray asked with his mouth full.

"Pizza, you moron" Sam said to him, adding his pizza boxes to the pile on the table. "Why did you tell me I had to order dinner?"

Tray shrugged, and kept eating.

SPOV

Tara and I ate our fish and chips on the dunes as the sun set. I wondered what Eric had rustled up for dinner. Probably pizza. That would make Tray happy at least. As long as it arrived on time. Tray tended to go a bit feral if you didn't feed him.

I was pretty certain I knew where that trait had come from. I often wondered if the girl he'd eventually end up with would just be the first one who let him in her house. And fed him on a regular basis.

Fish and chips are always better with the smell of the sea nearby and Tara and I managed to put away a fair amount of food between us. But at least my hangover had pretty much waned.

So I was feeling pretty good when we walked back up the hill to the bach. I checked my phone, which I'd left sitting in the bedroom, and that was when I realised I'd been on TV.

"Hey, we were on the news" I said to Tara, who was busy turning the lights on in the living room.

"We were?" she asked. "When?"

"Tonight. Must have been the people filming the race on the beach. Eric says they saw it. Well, he sent me a text saying _I've seen you on the evening news. I don't care if he follows you home, you can't keep him._

"What's that mean?" Tara asked.

"Dunno. Oh! Maybe he saw us talking to that lifesaver?"

"Must have" Tara agreed, as she walked into the kitchen and put water in the electric jug and set it to boil. "You're lucky he's not the jealous type!" she said.

"Yeah" I said. "I think he knows I'd rather have him."

"Plus it would be kind of weird" Tara mused, as she pulled some mugs out of a cupboard.

"What would? Having an affair with someone who reminds me of my son?"

"No! Having some guy follow you home, just because he likes the look of you. I couldn't imagine that happening."

"Mmm" I said. Funnily enough, I could. It had worked out pretty well though. In the long term. I guessed both Bill and Eric had decided they'd wanted me in their own ways, it's just Eric had been…well kind of direct about it. Possibly that was a good thing, if I was as hopeless as Tara thought I was.

I wasn't convinced, though. I thought under the right circumstances I could have been just as determined to get what I wanted as Eric. And then he really wouldn't have known what had hit him.

Yep, Tray was definitely just going to follow some girl home one day because she shared her sandwiches with him. I'd be sad when that happened. I loved my family. I was missing them all now and I'd only been away for a day.

I hoped they were missing me too.

**Thanks for reading!**


	56. Chapter 56

**A/N Not even going to say anything, other than that, in my defence, she's two and she probably won't remember there was a chocolate bunny in her haul at Easter. And...no, I don't have a defence for why this chapter doesn't finish off the weekend. But clearly, I am not a trustworthy individual. And I may be on a sugar-high :D**

**Disclaimer: Hardly worth it now, as I'm not even a reliable witness for myself :)**

EPOV

Sunday dawned brighter, mainly because no one woke me up by prodding me with a fucking cricket bat. It still felt odd not to have Sookie in bed, though. Kind of lonely. Not that I missed the kicks to the shins when I tried to cuddle her, or the annoyed sighing when I wanted to stretch.

I missed everything else about her being there, though. I really missed the possibility of Sunday morning sex.

I lay there and listened to the sounds coming from the rest of the house. It was eerily quiet. Was everyone else still asleep, or had they just murdered each other over a box of cereal and I'd be left disposing of the bodies for the rest of the morning?

I couldn't tell. It could have gone either way. So I got out of bed, just in case.

Sometimes it really fucking sucked being the only responsible parent around.

When I got to the kitchen, there were more alive people than there were dead bodies, so that was always a good sign. "You're up" Sam said, and then he went back to eating his slice of pizza.

"S'good cold" Tray said. He was eating the same thing. It wasn't anything I hadn't done before and it seemed to be filling them up OK. I left them to it and walked to the coffee maker.

"You guys are so gross" Amelia commented. "Pizza is _not_ breakfast food."

"It's food though" Tray said, as he picked off some pepperoni and threw it to a waiting Ivan.

"That's even more gross" Amelia said. "Now he's slobbered on the floor."

"It's only dog-slobber" Sam said.

"Which is gross" Amelia re-iterated.

"So, how was the movie Ames?" I asked her, in order to try to get the conversation moving on to something else. Felicia emerged from the pantry clutching a box of Weetbix. "Like Amelia actually watched the movie" she mumbled, but Amelia ignored her.

"Well" she said, putting down the container of orange juice she'd been holding. "It was really, really good. Even Riley said it was good, and he wasn't that into it to start with. But it was about this couple, right? And, like, they met in college…'cos it was set in the States, so, you know, it's not uni there. Oh, you do know. Anyway, so, like, they're really in love, and stuff, and going out, but…um, oh! See, he hasn't got much money, and he like, really wants to do well, and get, like a really important job."

"In what field?" I asked, hoping it might make Amelia get to the fucking point.

"Just…you know. Like a business-y type thing. So anyway, he's like trying really hard, but he's spending all his time with Jessica…that's the girl…"

"Like Jessi? That we know?" Tray asked.

"Well, yeah. But not, like, the same person."

"Well, duh" Felicia replied, sitting down at the table with her cereal. I waited for my coffee and hoped that the movie synopsis might be over. It wasn't.

"So, _anyway_! What happens then is, like, he cheats on this test…"

"He cheats, or it looks like he's cheated?" I asked.

"What?" Amelia asked, frowning at me. She picked up the orange juice and put it back in the refrigerator.

"You said 'like' Ames. That it was like he cheated. Did he cheat?"

"Well, yeah. Which is what I said. I didn't say like!"

"You can't hear yourself, can you?" Felicia threw in.

"Shut up! I'm talking to Dad" Amelia threw back at her. I was starting to regret asking this question. "So…anyway! He cheats and gets kicked out and then she, like, dumps him…which seems mean, when he did it so he could, like, get a better future. But anyway, they split up."

"And that's the end of the movie?" I asked.

"No! Yeah, funny. No, that's just the first bit. So, like, he doesn't have any money, but he starts this business, um…oh, yeah, well, he starts off helping this guy who's doing up a house, and then he starts, like, buying houses himself and then he makes all this money…"

"Because it's always that easy" I added in, but Amelia ignored me.

"So he has all this money, and he gets married and has some kids, and then ten years later his wife dies of cancer, and he's really upset about that…"

"As you would be" I commented.

"Well…yeah" Amelia said, frowning. I don't think she quite knew what to make of my input. I just wanted her to get to the fucking point. "So, like he's only about um…oh…um…"

"It would have been quicker to actually sit through the whole movie" Felicia said.

"Shut up, Leesh! You're just bitchy because of your period" Amelia said. Nice to see she still had that death wish.

"You are not the authority on periods!" Felicia yelled at Amelia.

"I am at the moment! While Mum's not here I am!" Amelia yelled back. I glanced over at the table. Sam and Tray had totally lost interest, or perhaps were just trying to pretend they couldn't hear, and were testing each other's reflexes with a certain amount of slapping and pushing. Well, they were happy.

"Oh, for God's sake" Felicia muttered, and she went back to eating her cereal.

"Was the movie about periods?" Pam asked, as she walked in carrying an arm-full of dolls and soft toys, which she deposited on the kitchen counter so they could see what we were all doing.

"No!" Amelia said. "No, it wasn't."

"Oh" Pam said, and she walked over to the refrigerator.

"So, _anyway_, when they meet up he's all sad and stuff, but he has all this money. And she's like really sad too, but she has no money because her parents kicked her out because she wanted to be a writer and, like, she couldn't write anything…you wouldn't kick me out, would you?" she asked me.

"Um…" I sipped my coffee. "No…I guess not."

"I'm never leaving home!" Pam called out from over by the toaster. "So I get Amelia's room when she goes!"

"I'm not going, duh! That's what I was just saying" Amelia said.

"But…you have to go sometime" Pam said. "And then I get your room."

"No. I get it" Sam said, looking up and getting his hand slapped by Tray in the process.

"No! I baggsed it first! Daddy! I get Amelia's room! Don't I?" Pam looked at me pleadingly.

"I'm not going!" Amelia yelled. "You're all like vultures!"

"You're more like a dodo bird. Completely, _like_, pointless" Felicia observed.

"Why is everyone picking on me?" Amelia asked.

"I'm not picking on you" Pam said, as she pulled toast out of the toaster. "I'm just preparing myself for more hand-me-downs."

"Rooms aren't hand-me-downs" Tray said. "Sam's stuff is hand-me-downs."

"My stuff is _my_ stuff. See? This is why I need a new room."

"And then I'll get that room" Tray said, as he swiped at Sam's hand, and missed.

"No! I'm getting the room!" Pam cried out.

"I can't believe you're all trying to make me leave!" Amelia wailed. "After everything I've done for you guys!"

"Like, what?" Felicia challenged.

"Oh, everything! Who found you tampons? And got Sam ready for cricket? And ordered the frigging pizza last night?"

"Well, everyone ordered pizza" Felicia said. "That's not special."

"And I rang Nana this morning, for Pam."

"Hang on, what?" I asked.

"I rang Nana, she said she's going to Mass first, but then Pam can come around and she'll help her knit. She also spent a lot of time talking about how it's no fun cooking for one, and it's nice to have some company. I think she was getting at Aunty Sarah; she doesn't visit very often at all. Although Aunty Caro is worse, but she lives overseas so can't help it. Aunty Sarah just doesn't make an effort. And can we take her some milk, because she's running low and can't get to the shops if she has to rush home to wait for Pam?"

"Lorena wants milk?" I checked.

"Yes" Amelia said. "And Pam."

"Anyone else?"

"No, just Pam. I have homework."

"You saw him last night, Ames!" Felicia said, as she got up to rinse out her bowl. "I mean, how exciting is it, to talk to him today? What are you going to do, recount the plot of the film to keep him entertained?"

"Shut up, Leesh. You're just jealous."

"Not of you" Felicia said, as she stomped out of the kitchen.

"She's really grumpy" Sam said to the room at large. No one disagreed with him.

"So can we go soon, Daddy?" Pam asked, and then she took a mouthful of toast and sprayed crumbs all over the floor. Ivan came over to snuffle at her feet and pick up what he could. "Ugh!" Pam said. "Dad! Ivan's slobbering on my feet."

"The trick, Pam, is not to cover yourself in crumbs."

"I didn't! Ivan's just doing it anyway! So when are we going?"

"Um…" I took another sip of coffee. "Soon. I haven't had breakfast yet."

"There's pizza" Tray pointed out. Yeah, even with Tray's best efforts the night before there was going to be pizza for a while.

"Mmm, think I'll pass" I said, as I tried to work out whether I wanted toast or cereal.

"You have to take me to the party" Sam said, out of the fucking blue.

"What party?" I asked.

"_The_ party. The one I'm going to. Today. It's Harry's party. You know. From cricket. And school." Sam stopped, probably aware that giving me more details wasn't making this ring any bells with me.

"Well, what time is that?" Fuck, it might have been nice if Sookie had left a fucking note about some of this stuff so the kids didn't just spring it on me.

"Dunno" Sam said, and he sat there contemplating that fact.

"Do you know where it is?" I asked him.

"Um…maybe at his house?" Sam said.

"Which is where?"

"Mt Eden."

I took another sip of coffee and thought about that. Mt Eden was not a small suburb by any fucking stretch of the imagination and trying to track down one ninth birthday party on a Sunday morning, even using the 'must be the house with the balloons tied to the letterbox' method of detection that Sookie was fond of, was simply not going to work.

"You'll have to ring his mum" Sam told me. "You know her."

"No I don't" I said. I had no fucking clue who she was.

"She gave you coffee! Yesterday! I saw you!" Sam yelled, clearly thinking I was lying. Or deaf. Or both.

"Oh. That woman" I said. "You sure you don't know where he lives?"

"No" Sam said.

"What's the number?" I asked.

"Oh…um. It'll be on the phone list for cricket."

"Which is where Sam?"

"In Mum's stuff…"

So Sam and I went through Sookie's office and it's interesting and varied filing system. For all that she liked to give me shit about the paper I had sitting around, she wasn't any better. And she didn't know how to keep things organised for shit. There was stuff all over the place.

While Sam and I were searching, Pam fretted in the background. "Are we going soon, Daddy?" she asked, repeatedly.

"Soon" I confirmed.

"But that's now" Pam complained. "And we're not going. You're looking at Mum's Jumping Beans stuff and we're not going."

"No, Pam. Soon is soon. Now is now."

"But…"

"Soon, Pam." Eventually she left, just as we discovered the list. Stuck to a cork board on the wall. With a bunch of other lists of phone numbers and things. Who knew that fucking existed?

"So. Ring her!" Sam urged.

I got my phone and dialled the number and explained the problem. And endured the laughter on the other end of the phone while Harry's mom made lots of comments about how lost I was without Sookie. I wasn't fucking lost; I was just…missing vital pieces of information. Information which Sookie had neglected to pass on to me, but I wasn't about to point that out to one of Sam's friend's mothers and have her thinking any less of Sookie. No, I'd take the blame.

Even though I really knew where the fault lay.

"OK" I said to Sam, when the call was finished. "We have to hurry to get ready. It's at 10 o'clock and it's at MOTAT."

"It is?" Sam asked. "Huh."

"What's at MOTAT?" Tray asked, coming in. That made Sookie's tiny office really fucking crowded.

"The party Sam's going to" I said.

"Oh" Tray said, sadly, and he left again. Yeah, he loved MOTAT, or the Museum of Transport and Technology. But he was shit out of luck this morning.

I'd have to remember to talk to Sookie about having Tray's next birthday party there. In the meantime, I needed to get Sam ready.

"You ready?" I asked.

"Yep" he said.

"Have you brushed anything? Teeth or hair?" Sam looked thoughtful. "Clean clothes might be nice too" I suggested.

"What clothes?" he asked.

"I don't know. Some of yours preferably. And get the gift. I'm going to have a quick shower." I started to walk out of the room.

"What gift?" Sam asked.

"What do you mean what gift? The gift for Harry."

"I don't have a gift for Harry."

"You can't go without a gift, Sam. What do you normally do?"

"Mum gives them to me" he said, kind of sadly.

"OK, get ready, then we'll go and we'll get…fuck, I don't know. A gift card." Sam pulled a face that suggested he thought that was a fucking lame idea. "Got a better suggestion?" I asked. He shook his head. "Gift card it is then."

When I caught up with Sam again, he looked slightly more polished. The t-shirt he was now wearing was cleaner than the previous one, for a start. I couldn't have put my hand on my heart and sworn that he'd brushed his hair, but I was hopeful about the teeth. Well, maybe no one would stand that close to him.

"OK, let's go" I said. And then Pam came running out of her bedroom, carrying a shopping bag full of her knitting things. "Wait for me!" she called out.

Fuck. Yes. Lorena's as well. "Off we all go then."

On the way to the supermarket, Pam sang us both a song she learned at school. By the third time she was singing "Daisy, Daisy. Give me your answer doooo…" at the top of her voice, Sam and I were both looking a little pained. Pam loved singing. It was just fucking unfortunate she'd inherited not only Sookie's enthusiasm for singing but also her abilities. Pam could not carry a tune.

"Very nice, Pam" I said, hoping she'd finished.

"I haven't finished!" she admonished.

"My ears are bleeding" Sam muttered.

It was a relief when we got to the supermarket.

"So, where are the gift cards?" I asked the kids. Both shrugged in a way that made them look uncannily alike. Weird. But not at all fucking helpful.

Luckily we found them at the end of the aisle which held all the wine, but only after we'd walked up the aisle next to it, and had to come all the way back down again. I did, however, note that the supermarket now had displays of condoms attached to the shelves of wine and beer. That was a much better marketing strategy than having them next to the fucking pregnancy tests, that was for fucking sure.

"So, which card?" I asked Sam as he surveyed them.

"Look!" Pam screeched. "You can get Smiggle ones!"

"Yes, you can Pam. But we're looking for something Sam's friend might enjoy."

"Well, everyone likes Smiggle" Pam said dismissively.

"I don't" Sam informed her.

"Yeah…but you're weird" Pam told him. "Maybe Harry's not weird."

"I think…maybe…the movies? Or, um…I don't know…" Sam said, looking lost.

"Movies it is then" I said, selecting a card. Pam yelled "Back in a minute!" and ran off. Fuck, I hoped I didn't have to go and find her before we could leave.

"OK. Birthday card" I said. "Where are they kept?"

Sam looked blank. "Dunno" he said, looking around. I didn't think they were with the wine…although; people did give wine as gifts. It wouldn't be a fucking stupid idea. And it would help, if they were next to the gift cards.

But they weren't.

"Haven't you seen them? When you've been here before?" I asked him, and he shook his head. "Mum would know" Sam said sadly. "She knows lots of things, like when she came to school the other day, she knew that cat in the playground belonged to the house with the blue door, and we took it home. And she knows that you shouldn't flick the bat with your bottom hand, or else they'll catch you out really easily. And she knows who's ordered pizza and we don't end up with so many. And she knows when the parties are, and who gets what present. And stuff."

I sighed. "Yes, Sam" I agreed. "Your mother is very beautiful and very wise, and knows most of what goes on…" I had been about to finish by saying 'but she's not here, and she didn't leave a fucking list and we're on our own', but Sam interrupted me by saying "Yeah. She is."

So we agreed on that point then.

Eventually we walked up the aisle with the candy and found the birthday cards opposite the magazine stand. Pam was waiting there for us, holding a bottle of milk. "Is this right?" she asked, holding it up.

I shrugged. "It's milk" I said. I had no fucking idea which milk Lorena wanted. Or why we were fucking tasked with bringing it to her. Sam looked at the cards. "They're all a bit stink" he said.

"Just pick one" I urged, and he did, finally, with a bit of input from Pam who insisted that if it was for a boy it needed to be a Spiderman one and no amount of Sam disagreeing with her was going to persuade her otherwise.

Once we'd paid, and got back in the car and Pam had lectured me on the fact I'd been using a parking space reserved for parents, we headed to MOTAT, in order to spend more time locating a parking space there.

I finally parked, and then had to negotiate my way through the ticket booth in order to drop Sam off. I don't think the kid selling tickets was really convinced I was coming straight back out again, and he was definitely suspicious of Pam, despite her disdain of the place. The only part she liked were the old Victorian cottages which came complete with furnishings, household items and mannequins dressed in period clothing. The adult mannequins weren't all that much bigger than Pam herself was and she found that absolutely fascinating. The last time we'd been here as a family she'd spent a long time telling me how shit my life would have been if I'd had to live in one of those houses "Because you'd never be able to stand up, Daddy! Everyone was so short back then. Even Mum'd be tall!"

This time though we went straight to where the party was in full swing, with kids doing experiments and generally running around. Sam promptly ran off to join his friends and I added the envelope with the gift card and the birthday card to the pile of presents. Yeah, our effort looked pretty shit next to all the others. Not much I could do about it now.

I saw Harry's mom and checked that she was OK with me leaving Sam and then I had to get Pam to leave the person she was talking to. "I'm off to see Nana Lorena and do some knitting" she told the poor woman. "Well, she's not my _real_ Nana, but my real Nana is a bit funny, and doesn't like boys…which means she doesn't like Daddy, which is kind of weird, because he's _not_ a boy, and…"

"OK, Pam" I interrupted. "Let's go."

"OK!" Pam said happily. "Bye!" she said brightly to the woman she'd been talking to, and then she grabbed my hand and started skipping along beside me.

"Bye, Pam!" the woman called after us.

"That's Venetia and Florentine's mum" Pam said. "Their brother is in Sam's team too."

"Uh-huh, and what's his name?"

"Roman."

"Of course it is." Pam gave me a funny look. I didn't know why, I hadn't named my kids based on a fucking geographical theme.

Luckily it was only a five minute drive to Lorena's place. Pam got increasingly excited the closer we got. "I hope she likes the wool I picked" she said to me.

"I'm sure she will, Pam" I said. I had no fucking clue. I'd just let her buy what she wanted when we'd been at Spotlight. It seemed OK to me. Pam had liked it because, apparently, it matched her eyes.

She was probably right.

We parked outside Lorena's little apartment and Pam skipped along the path and up the steps, before knocking on the door. I walked behind, carrying the container of milk like Pam's butler.

"I made it!" Pam said when Lorena opened the door. Lorena blinked a few times. "We had to take Sam to a party, but it was a boring boy party, not a real party. Not like my party. My party was great! Next year, I'm having a Musketeer party though, with swords!"

"Um…hello?" Lorena said, sounding slightly timid. It occurred to me that perhaps she was a little scared of Pam.

"Hi!" Pam said, still sounding bright. "We brought milk!" I took that as my cue to hand over what I was carrying.

"Oh" Lorena said. "Oh. That's a lot of…um, full-fat milk, isn't it? I guess I could give some to Judith…" Pam didn't really care about that, and pretty much barged inside at that point. I was about to ask what time I needed to collect her when Lorena squared herself and looked at me. "You'd better come in then" she said, before turning around and walking away from the door.

I didn't really have a fucking choice. I went in too. The door led straight into Lorena's living room, which hadn't changed one iota since the first time I'd been here. Lorena herself had gone further on, presumably into the kitchen to put the milk away, and Pam was busy settling herself on the sofa and pulling out the contents of the shopping bag she'd brought with her.

I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to be fucking doing.

Lorena walked back in. "I don't know what happened" she said. "But this…this…_thing_ keeps coming on, and I don't know what to do to get rid of it. Amelia said you could help." She looked at me.

I was missing something here.

"I'm sorry?" I asked.

"What for? Oh. Yes. The television set. It keeps getting a little box on the screen, and I can't make head or tails of it. There's the remote." She picked the remote off a side-table and handed it to me.

OK. So Amelia was hiring out my services as an appliance repair guy. Fucking good to know. I wondered if this was the sole reason Pam had been allowed over here today.

"Calvin was supposed to do it" Lorena sniffed. "But you know what he's like. They're all unreliable."

I wasn't sure whether she meant builders or South Africans, or maybe men in general. I wasn't about to fucking ask for clarification. I switched on the TV and walked a little closer to it to see what the problem was. Nothing as far as I could tell. I turned the volume right down, because it was fucking deafening, and waited.

"Look!" Pam said to Lorena. "I got this pattern. For a shrug. Can we make it?"

"I suppose so. Looks fairly simple" Lorena said. I wondered if it would kill her to show a little more enthusiasm.

"And look, I got this wool. It's blue, like my eyes, and it has kind of silver sparkly bits that are in the wool too."

"Mmm" Lorena said, not sounding enthusiastic. I watched the TV and waited. "I don't know" Lorena said. I turned to look at her, and she was fingering the yarn Pam had brought and looking displeased. "It's a bit harsh" she said. "And it's an awfully bright blue."

"Oh" Pam said, looking crestfallen. I fucking knew this wasn't a great idea. That old hag was going to ruin Pam's day and I'd be left picking up the pieces. I was about to suggest leaving when I glanced back at the screen and realised what the problem was; the TV had automatically detected a new channel and would tune it in if the 'OK" button was pressed on the remote.

I pressed the 'OK' button. Now we could leave.

While I'd been doing that, Lorena had left the room. Nice. Nothing like fucking upsetting a small girl and then running. Pam was looking at the knitting pattern she had laid out on her lap and not at me, so I couldn't quite make out her expression. If she was sad, we were going. That was fucking it.

Lorena came back in. "Here" she said, holding out an ancient plastic bag to Pam. "This will be better."

Pam reached in and pulled out more yarn. Only this stuff was a very pale pink. And very, very fluffy.

"Oh!" Pam said admiringly. "It's so soft!"

"Angora" Lorena said. "When my girls were little I knitted them all matching cardigans from it. I used this for some of the grandchildren, but I had some left over. It will be much nicer."

"Yes" Pam said. "Oh, Daddy! Look what Nana Lorena gave me!"

"Very nice, Pam" I said to her. "Well, uh, the TV's working and I'll just come back…?"

"I think, maybe 1 o'clock?" Lorena said. "Pamela can have lunch here, if she'd like."

"OK." I started to walk out.

"Thank-you Eric" Lorena said, very formally. "You've been a big help."

"No problem, Lorena." As I opened the front door to leave, I could hear Pam asking "Did they really all wear the same cardis, all four of them? My sisters won't dress like me. I wish they would."

Well, if she wanted to give Felicia a pale pink sweater or even a sparkly blue one, she was on her own, that was for fucking sure.

**Thanks for reading!**


	57. Chapter 57

**A/N Yep, I've gone old-school this week and managed to crank out three chapters in three days. Yay me! **

**So this brings us to the end of the main part of this story. I know, it's a bit sad. So a big, big, big thank-you to all of you for reading this, and for reviewing, and for keeping me going after all this time. You're all awesome.**

**I haven't marked it as complete because there will, in the not-too-distant future, be some extra bonus type chapters added. The plan at the moment is to jump forward nine years for the first one. But feel free to throw in any requests :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Sunday was another bright, sunny day. I was awake by 7 o'clock, which seemed a bit cruel, given I was on holiday. But without the hang-over of the previous morning I couldn't stay asleep any longer.

I got out of bed and made myself breakfast in a silent, quiet kitchen. Weird. I wondered what everyone was doing at home. And if Eric had made it out of bed yet. Or maybe he'd been dragged out by the kids when they needed him to adjudicate some kind of battle they had going on.

Eventually Tara got out of bed. She seemed to be better at this sleeping-in thing than I was, but I figured her kids were older and not as needy. Maybe Charlotte and Lachie were past the stage of trying to murder each other over who got what cup? Maybe they'd never had that stage and that was just my house? Maybe I wouldn't ask.

Once Tara had eaten and we'd cleaned ourselves and the place up a bit, we headed out for a long walk to the waterfalls back in the bush, where we took off our shoes and dipped our feet into the water while we sunbathed on the rocks surrounding it. It was nice. We chatted, mostly about food and recipes we'd tried, and about what our kids had been doing recently. It was a lovely morning.

But I was going to be happy to go home.

EPOV

I walked back in the front door and kicked a bag out of my way, which made Edward jump. Fucking cat. He picked the worst fucking places to go to sleep. The hallway was a high traffic area and it was more than likely someone would stand on him. Probably me. Then he'd squeal that horrific squeal of his which made everyone think his throat was being cut, and not that I'd accidentally brushed the tip of his tail with my foot, and then Sookie would come out and berate me for not looking where I was going when I wasn't the one who thought it was a fucking good idea to take a nap in the middle of the fucking hallway.

Except that she wouldn't this time.

Edward sat up and tried to lick some of the glitter off his front leg. Yeah, he was pretty fucked with that. It was all over his back too.

Ivan came trotting out to greet me. That was better. At least with dogs you got loyalty. I couldn't really see the point of cats. They were all retarded like Edward, disdainful like Bella or fucking psychotic like Stan. I'd rather have a dog any day.

I walked towards the kitchen and I could hear Amelia's voice "…so, like, at the end when they realise they should be together forever and he totally forgives her for writing that book based on his relationship with his wife, and that she died and stuff, it's, like, really, really romantic, you know? Well, you don't. But, like, even Riley, who didn't really want to see it, thought it was a _really_ good movie. And normally he likes ones with, like, all the action and stuff in them."

"I like those" Tray said. That's what I thought he said. His mouth was kind of full.

I walked into the kitchen. "Oh. Hello" Amelia said to me. "You're back."

"You sound surprised. I do live here."

Amelia shrugged, and stood up. "Are you eating lunch?" I asked Tray.

"Morning tea" he said, taking another bite of his pizza.

"The leftover pizza was supposed to be for lunch, Tray." He shrugged and kept on eating.

"There'll be enough pizza" Amelia said. "Are you making coffee?" she asked me.

"I might." I walked over to the coffeemaker. "Where's Leesh?"

"At Caitlin's" Amelia replied.

"Did I know about that?"

"Mum did."

"Not the same thing, Ames."

"Well…I knew. She told me."

"Mmm, still not quite the same thing." I was starting to worry that if Sookie didn't come home soon, Amelia would just take over everything. I wasn't sure I was really prepared for that kind of regime change, and I got the impression that any favours I had built up under Sookie's rule, I was going to lose under Amelia's.

"We watched _The Avengers_. It was cool" Tray said to Amelia.

"Again?" she asked, and she pulled a face to show what she thought of the movie.

"Remember what I said, Tray" I warned him.

"About what?" he asked, looking blank.

"About the hammer. It stays in the garage."

"But, that's not fair! Pam and Felicia got swords!" he whined.

"Cardboard swords. Not potentially sibling-maiming weapons of mass annoyance. No fucking hammers, got it?"

Tray sighed, and looked grumpy, but didn't say anything else.

Amelia took her coffee back to her bedroom, using the excuse of homework to lock herself away in there. "You got any homework?" I asked Tray.

He shook his head. "Nah" he said. "I'm sweet." He stood up and looked around the room; he looked a little lost without Sam there to tell him what was happening.

I kind of got how he felt.

"Might go outside" he said, and after a little while I heard the tell-tale dull thuds that let me know he was out there kicking his ball repeatedly against the side of the house. Right near Amelia's bedroom window.

"Stop doing that Tray!" Amelia yelled.

"It's a free country!" Tray yelled back.

"No it's the garden! That's not a free country. It's the friggin' garden!"

I wasn't sure whether it was worrying or comforting that even when we were down to just two kids, it wasn't exactly quiet around here.

I drank my coffee. I read the news on my phone. I wondered if I should be doing some of Sookie's chores. I decided I'd only do them incorrectly anyway. I heated up some of the pizza and ate it. There was a shitload of pizza left. Tray came in and ate some with me and tried to tell me a long, involved story about Stormtroopers who turned cannibal, because how awesome would that be, when you took off a helmet and just found a half-eaten face?

I asked Amelia if she wanted any pizza and she came into the kitchen, took one slice of the vegetarian one, and scuttled back to her room. Tray left again. Felicia came home, ate some pizza, refused to talk and yelled at me when I mentioned homework, like I was the person who set it in the first place. She told me I was interfering and I needed to stop interfering because she was perfectly capable of doing it herself. She stormed out of the kitchen and came back five minutes later when she wanted me to help her with her math homework, all her previous comments forgotten.

She was lucky I didn't hold grudges.

I finished helping Felicia and then went back out and collected Sam from the party. He was hyped up and excited, which would probably thrill Tray who was still wandering around the house looking lost and annoying his older sisters. One day that was going to get him killed.

Picking up Pam was next, and she was harder to peel away. "How'd it go?" I asked her, as she finally came to the door that Lorena had opened when I'd knocked.

"Good!" she said, "Although that fluffy wool is a little hard to work with and Nana Lorena says the shrug is going to take a while. It has arm-holes and stuff. So, she said leave it here and she'll work on it during the week and I can come back sometime and we'll do some more together. But I did make this!" Pam thrust an object at me. I recognised it as something made from the blue and silver wool that had been rejected earlier for the shrug-thing.

"That's nice" I said. I had no fucking idea was it was. Some kind of toy perhaps?

"Try it on" Pam urged.

"On?" I asked. "On me?"

"Yeah. I made it! It's a hat. The colour matches your eyes!"

Oh. Fuck. Just what I really fucking didn't need, an ugly blue beanie.

I put it on. Pam beamed. Lorena, who was standing behind Pam in the doorway, smirked. Just a little.

"That looks good, Daddy!" Pam said. "Does it fit OK?"

"Um, it's a little tight..." I hoped that would get me out of wearing it.

"You have a big head" Pam said, like it was my fault it didn't fit. "It'll stretch though."

Pam and Lorena said their goodbyes, and I thanked her for having Pam, and then we walked to the car. I was still wearing the hat. I wondered when I got to take it off.

"I like cottage cheese!" Pam said. "I've never had it before, but I like it. It's nice. Do you like it, Daddy? Nana Lorena says she has it every day, and it's good for you. Is it?"

"It's OK. I guess" I said. I wasn't an expert on the properties of fucking cottage cheese. I was getting a headache from the hat.

"Look at Dad's new hat!" Pam yelled at Sam as we got into the car. "I made it!"

"Uh-huh" Sam said. "And then the guy doing all the experiments got me to help with one, and that was pretty cool too. And then they had pizza delivered for lunch…"

"More pizza?" I asked.

"Yeah. I didn't eat that much. What's for dinner?"

"Don't know."

"Is Mum going to be back?"

"Yes." I fucking hoped so.

"That's alright then" Sam said, and I tried not to feel too down about his lack of faith in my ability to provide dinner for them all.

As predicted Tray was happy to have Sam home, and interested in the party at MOTAT. Pam mainly screamed "Look at Daddy's hat that I made!" at all her siblings, and they did, in turn, look at the hat. I tried not to be too offended by the face Amelia pulled when she saw it, or affronted by Felicia's total inability not to giggle to herself. After all, I hadn't made the fucking thing. I was just stuck wearing it. For how long, I didn't fucking know.

I went to do some work in the office, still wearing the fucking hat because every so often Pam would come in and say something like "Doesn't it look nice, Daddy?" or "I made a whole hat all by myself…mostly by myself…but it's a _whole_ hat!" And once she said "It makes your eyes look really blue, Daddy. And really pretty. You have pretty eyes."

That might have been the first time anyone had ever told me that. Maybe that was worth wearing the stupid hat in the first place?

Pam must have found something else to do, or someone else to annoy, because I managed to get some stuff done. I didn't take the hat off though. Just in case.

And then Tray came in. "Dad, what do you know about Romans?" he asked.

"Roman's what?"

"You know. Romans."

"Yeah. Pam said. About his what?"

"Who?" Tray screwed his face up in confusion.

"Roman. Sam's friend."

"No! Not that dickhead. Actual Romans. Like, the dead guys. That wore those sheet-things."

"Not much. Why?" This all sounded a little bit suspicious to me.

"Just because. I have to do…um, some stuff. On them."

"Like, homework? Homework that you said you didn't have?"

"It's not homework. It's an assignment."

"That's the same fucking thing Tray."

"No, I don't think so" he looked pretty adamant. "Homework you have to do that night. Assignments they give you heaps longer to do them in."

I don't think he realised that didn't make the fact he didn't own up to it earlier sound any better. "And this _assignment_, that they gave you a fuck-load of time to complete, is due when, exactly, Tray?"

"Um…tomorrow?"

"Fuck, Tray. Really?"

Tray didn't quite pick up on my annoyance. "Oh. I think so" he said, staring at the wall like it held the answer.

"So, it's on Romans?" I asked, trying to get to the bottom of what was required.

"Yeah. D'you know much about Pompey?"

"Pompey? Fucking nothing, Tray." I think I'd watched some show about Rome once and he'd been one of the characters, but I couldn't fucking remember any of it. "We'll have to Google him."

"Him?" Tray asked.

"Yes. Pompey. What?"

"I just…that doesn't sound right." Tray was utterly confused about the whole fucking thing. I wondered how the hell he ever made it through school.

Maybe he didn't? Maybe he'd drop out of school and spend his life crashing here in between dead-end jobs. That was a depressing thought.

"Do you have any instructions for this assignment, Tray?" He sighed, like I was the one who was being fucking difficult, and ran out of the room, only to scuttle in a little while later carrying a very crumpled piece of paper.

On closer examination the paper had some interesting stains, possibly from food products, and a myriad of smudgy fingerprints. It was also headed up with the word 'Pompeii'.

"It's on Pompeii, Tray. Not Pompey."

"Yeah, that's what I said!" Tray insisted. I sighed. There was a difference, but trying to explain it was probably going to take up a lot of the afternoon.

"So what do you know about Pompeii?" I asked him.

"Um…there was, um…people lived there…"

"Romans?"

"Yeah. Them." We were off to a fucking awesome start. Google it was then.

Ten minutes later we'd discovered the Romans may have invented pizza. Tray was impressed, but it wasn't going to make an assignment on Pompeii. Not unless we handed in something with the left-over pizza fucking glued to it.

Another half an hour longer and we actually had some information on Pompeii. I printed it out for Tray and then had to stop him scrunching the pieces of paper up. "Leave it flat, Tray."

'Why?" he asked.

"Because then you can keep it neat, and stack it. See? Like that."

"Mum says that's a dead tree."

"Sometimes your mother has an unnatural interest in foliage. Just hold the damn paper flat."

Tray sighed, but held it. And that's all he did. He just kept standing there. "What?" I asked him.

"I don't know what to do" he said.

"Do your assignment. Write about Pompeii, and what it was like before and after the volcano erupted."

"Yeah…sounds kind of stink though."

"I don't think discussing the stink-ness of the assignment is an option, Tray. Just write it."

"Can I draw a picture?"

"It's probably wise." Tray was quite good at drawing. He needed to get some marks somewhere.

"What of?"

"I don't know. The eruption?"

"What about the eruption?"

"When the volcano went up, Tray. I don't know. Draw; um…draw the lava coming down. And people running from it."

"Oh. There was lava?"

"Much lava. That's what killed them. That and not being able to run fast enough to escape the lava."

"So all those Romans, they died in really, really hot lava?"

"Yes, Tray."

"So they fell in? Like Anakin before the Emperor rescued him and turned him into Darth Vadar?"

"Exactly like that" I said, pleased we were getting somewhere. "But without the whole being rescued and becoming a Sith Lord in a mask part."

"Awesome."

"Not so much for them. But there you go. You've found a subject, go and draw that." Tray left, still clutching the print-outs I'd given him.

And then I could finally get some fucking peace and quiet.

SPOV

As I opened the front door after Tara dropped me off at home, I had a small moment of panic when I thought maybe a bunch of fairies had moved in while I wasn't paying attention. The entrance-way was full of bags and glitter. It was like there was a fairy jamboree going on somewhere.

And then I noticed that the bags were all school bags. Well, Sam's cricket bag seemed to have migrated out here too, but mostly they were school bags. Still probably containing lunchboxes, and the fetid remains of whatever hadn't been eaten on Friday.

Just…lovely.

I left my overnight bag with the pile and took the shopping bags I was holding into the kitchen. Tray and Sam were standing there with the fridge door open. "I don't want any more of that one" Tray said.

"Just eat it, Tray" Sam said, sounding remarkably like Eric. They turned around and I noticed they were both holding slices of pizza.

"Is that lunch?" I asked them.

"Afternoon tea" Tray said. He sounded a little sad.

"Well, I'm home" I announced, hoping for some kind of greeting.

"Uh-huh" Tray said, and he ran out of the room.

"So, did you have a nice time?" Sam asked me, while standing there eating his pizza.

"Yeah, I did" I said to him, as I unloaded the shopping I'd brought home with me. Well, I tried to clear a space on the kitchen bench anyway. There were a lot of crumbs, and some of Pam's toys in the way. Plus the butter had been left out. That was going to be a bit melted now. I wiped the big smear of butter off the top of the oven while I was at it.

"And…uh. You met someone?" Sam prompted.

"What?"

"That guy. The one in his togs."

"Oh. Yeah. Did everyone see me on TV?" I asked. Sam nodded. "Cool. I'm a celebrity!"

Sam didn't look like it was cool to have a mother who was a celebrity. "So, uh…who was that?"

"Just some guy" I replied, putting things in the fridge. There was a truck-load of pizza in there though. How much had Eric ordered?

"So…you don't know him?" Sam asked again.

"No. He was collecting for the surf life-savers. But I didn't have any money, just my card."

Sam looked thoughtful, and then like he'd had an epiphany. "That was in your bra!" he said. "We couldn't figure it out. Dad watched it a gazillion times trying to work out why you kept showing that guy your bra."

"Did he? OK. Good to know." From the sound of it my TV debut had not been a dignified one. So, poo.

Sam wandered off and Felicia came in. "Hello" she said.

"Hi. Did you have a nice weekend?" I asked her.

"S'alright. Pretty boring. What was Piha like?"

"Really good. We went for lots of walks and stuff."

"You do all the fun stuff!" Felicia complained "And you went to the beach! We saw you!"

"Well, yeah" I said. I had been to Piha after all. Felicia continued muttering to herself and opened the fridge door. "It's all just pizza in here!" she yelled. I wasn't sure if she was yelling at me or not.

Was it my imagination, I wondered, or had something happened to Felicia while I was away?

"Um…did anything happen?" I tried asking.

"What? No. Nothing. Don't be nosy."

"Don't be cheeky."

Felicia sighed, loudly. It was the kind of sigh that signified no one in the world could understand just how terrible her life was at this moment. I'd heard it before, but always from Amelia. That was really odd.

Felicia sat down at the table with her glass of juice and played with her phone. Eric came in, carrying a coffee cup. It was always a nice sight when the cups were actually coming back into the kitchen and not disappearing out of it never to be seen again.

Plus I'd missed him. A lot. I went to give him a hug, and then stopped.

"What's with the hat?" I asked.

"Oh" Eric said, patting it. "Apparently it matches my very pretty eyes."

"Well, that's true" I said, smiling as he batted his eyelashes at me. "But I didn't think it was hat weather."

"Well…" Eric started, but then Pam burst in. "I MADE IT!" she yelled. "I made Daddy a hat and he loves it! Aren't I clever?"

"Yes, you are" Eric told Pam.

"You were on TV!" Pam told me.

"So I hear" I said.

"You weren't wearing a nice hat" Pam said. "I'll make you one next."

"Thanks, Pam" I said, and I gave her a quick hug and let her run off again, before I finally got my hug from Eric. And a kiss. Felicia made some noises in the background that were similar to those Stan made when he was hacking up a fur ball.

It was nice to be home.

When I finally managed to get Eric to remember that breathing wasn't optional, and that hands needed to stay in appropriate places when minors were present, Eric looked over at Felicia, who was still trying to ignore us. "Did you tell Mom your news?" he asked her.

"Mum" Felicia said. "'S'not news."

"What's not news?" I asked.

Felicia sighed, and kept ignoring me. "She'll just find out from Amelia" Eric said to Felicia.

"Igotmyperiod" Felicia said, quickly.

"Period?" I asked.

"Yep" Felicia confirmed. "I think you might have heard of them."

"Well, yeah" I said, a bit stunned by it. It seemed early, although I figured mine had started the month of my twelfth birthday and Amelia had been about eleven and a half. Felicia was only four months shy of twelve now, she just didn't seem old enough.

What had happened to my chubby little baby girl? The one with the curls and the giggles? The one who liked to use Eric as furniture and eat his leftovers and chew all his stuff?

I hated this part. While I didn't want them to stay babies forever, it always sucked when they turned into surly teenage girls.

"So…everything OK? With it? With you?" I asked, and Felicia curled her lip at me.

"Yes, Mum!" she said, with a sigh. And then she walked out of the kitchen.

"That's sad" I said to Eric.

"Yeah" he said. "But she coped pretty well, once she stopped yelling at me to go and get you."

"She did?" I asked. Was it bad that I felt pleased that, for some part of the weekend at least, Felicia had wanted my input?

"Yep, but I fixed it" Eric said. "Well, Amelia helped. Pam might have helped. A bit."

"OK. What else happened?" I asked.

"OK. Well, kids are annoying, kids who don't live here are worse, not even Tray's farts will get rid of some people. Amelia needs to stop sharing with Pam, always lock the bathroom door, late nights are only great if there isn't an early morning, Sam's cricket bat needs to stay in the garage with the hammer, people are prejudiced if you don't wear shoes, cricket is shit even with coffee. Amelia is fucking bossy, but if you leave her to deal with people, she'll eventually boss them out of the house, or just talk them to death. Um, what else? Oh, Spotlight is crap, but I already knew that. I'm surprised you don't know that, or maybe you do, and that's why I had to go. Sam has an admirer, but he doesn't know what to do about that, and I think maybe the trauma of being handed warm coins too many times is going to stunt his development in that department. Far too many people in this house have access to the internet. Your ability to attract waifs and strays doesn't diminish when you leave home…where is he by the way?"

"Dunno" I said. "Not in the water, anyway. Rotator cuff injury."

"Uh-huh" Eric said, giving me a narrow-eyed look. "Where was I? Oh yes, Amelia's services cost a fucking fortune, mine are pretty cheap and just require knitting lessons for Pam. Sam is shit at remembering things, and Tray is possibly worse. I think that's everything."

"The glitter?" I prompted. "In the hallway? Impromptu fairy party?"

"Sword-fight" Eric said. "Don't ask."

"OK" I said, nodding. "Well, that sounds, uh, kind of action-packed."

"Oh, you have no fucking idea, Sookie, you really don't."

"At least you found the list" I said, pointing to my list which was still pinned up in the middle of the fridge door along with all the other bits of paper that were on there.

"List?" Eric said, and then he peered at the fridge too. Possibly he muttered something under his breath. Most likely it was 'fuck'. "Yes" he said. "List."

That didn't really tell me whether he'd read it or not, but I didn't get a chance to ask as the phone rang, and I answered it. It was Judith, wanting to moan about Lorena and talk about work. I talked to her, while I started getting dinner ready. Eric made his coffee and left the kitchen again, still wearing his hat.

I finished the call and was nearly done with dinner when Tray came in. "What's for dinner?" he asked.

"Um…kind of a salad. But not really" I said, bracing myself for his complaints. "It's a warm chicken and potato salad."

"So…not pizza?" Tray asked.

"Nope, definitely not pizza."

"Cool" Tray said, which seemed a little bit out of character. "Hey, Mum" he said. "D'you wanna see my project on Pompeii?"

"Yes, please" I said. I was glad Eric had got that far on the list. He must have if they'd been working on the assignment. Tray handed me a sheet of paper. There were some words on it, so that was promising. Most of it was taken up by a drawing of a bunch of people dying in agony as they were swallowed up by a river of lava.

"Um…very creative" I said, handing it back to Tray.

"Yeah" he said. "Dad helped."

"I hope you said thank-you" I said to him, and he gave me a funny look, like he couldn't understand why he'd thank Eric for doing something that came with the job description.

"It's only polite" I said to him, and he shrugged and walked off.

I was just putting the finishing touches on dinner when Amelia came in. I was actually pretty proud of what I'd managed to create in such a short time. Tara had given me the idea when we'd been discussing recipes earlier in the day, and we'd stopped on the way home to buy the ingredients. Basically it was bagged salad, over which you placed slices of boiled new potato and some shredded chicken and then you topped it all off with a dressing made from sour cream and sweet chilli sauce. I thought it looked pretty good.

"I don't want any of the chicken" Amelia said, by way of a greeting.

"Hello" I said to her.

"Yes, hello" Amelia said.

"Busy weekend?" I asked.

"You have no freaking idea!" she said, and then she started. Bizarrely it was very similar in tone to the breakdown I'd had earlier from Judith on what was happening with her life. You could really tell they were related.

"First off, I end up, like, responsible for Yvetta. When she decides to have a life-crisis, and stuff. And like, totally not my problem, but I couldn't just leave her, you know? So I _had_ to bring her home. I thought, like, Dad would really flip out, but he was really weird about it all. I think he's a big softie, really. And then like, I was stuck with her. Aargh! And then Leesh had a meltdown too, and then Dad didn't know what the hell to do with that, she was, like, yelling and crying because you weren't here. Poor thing. It's not nice the first time. So I had to sort that. And then I was still stuck with Yvetta over-night. Couldn't sleep a wink! Got up and found Sam running round in a total flap about cricket. None of them had thought about _that _the night before. So I got him sorted for that, and then I finally got rid of Yvetta, because, like, it was just that Ana couldn't work her phone and she's got her own toyboy, so she doesn't need Yvetta's. Well, Dylan's not a toyboy to Yvetta, I guess. But she doesn't want Dylan. Chloe's got worms and she went home 'cos of them. Not the bad worms, like you thought Tray had. The worms that are good for the garden. _And then_ I finally got to go out BY MYSELF, and no one needed me for anything! That was nice. I was really tired of people needing me."

"OK" I said. That seemed like quite a lot of things that happened in one weekend. But Amelia always over-dramatized stuff. I was sure it wasn't that bad.

"So…Yvetta was upset?" I asked.

"Yeah! Like, really upset. Leaving home upset. But I stopped that, because as Chloe said, she'd last, like, five minutes out in the real world. She's a bit hopeless. Like Dad."

"Dad's…hopeless?" I asked. From what I'd seen so far Eric had been coping with stuff. Sure, there were bags and rotten food scraps in the hallway, the kitchen was a bombsite, I didn't want to know what the laundry situation was and it seemed like they'd lived on pizza. But they were all still here. And in one piece. That was half the battle.

"Well, you know he is really" Amelia said, conspiratorially. "I mean…that's why he has you, right?" She paused and thought for a minute. "Is that why we have him? I mean, not that he's like dangerous if you don't watch him. Like Tray is. Or is that why Tray's like that? I mean, you had to bring him home, didn't you?"

"Well, I didn't _have_ to" I said. "I wanted to." I started putting boiled potato slices on the plates I had lined up along the bench.

"Yeah…but, I think he, like, would have been really in trouble if you hadn't let him stay. God knows what would have happened to him." There was silence while we both contemplated that fact, and then I had to carry on with dinner.

Felicia stuck her head around the door. "You blabber-mouthing, Ames?" she asked.

"No!" Amelia said, but Felicia had already gone. "That's her hormones" Amelia said knowledgably. "Poor kid."

"Mmm" I agreed.

It was good to be back. Well, that feeling lasted about five minutes into dinner when an argument broke out about whether my descriptor of salad actually applied to dinner and neither side of the debate wanted to back down. It got quite nasty.

And after dinner I was too busy to feel anything other than busy. I had stuff to sort and tidy up and a heck of a lot of glitter to vacuum up. It was all through Eric's office too. There was laundry to put on, and I wasn't sure Sam's cricket gear would ever be white again. And then I had to get things ready for the next day, clean out lunchboxes so they could be used again, make sure homework was mostly done, get Amelia to stop chatting to Riley, tell Felicia to stop thumping Sam over the head because he'd get brain-damage with the weight she was putting behind some of those whacks. I had to quietly apologise to Sam for doubting his ability to withstand blows from a mere girl, and tell Tray, once again, that calling someone a 'gay mental' wasn't appropriate, and I was sure he could come up with better insults.

I also had to reiterate that Ivan wasn't gay, and Eric wasn't fixed like Ivan was, we just weren't having any more babies. Telling Tray that saying it was because Pam was a pretty stink baby wasn't a nice thing to say, was a bit redundant after she over-heard him and had to be consoled by Eric, who was still dutifully wearing his blue hat.

And then, eventually, eventually everyone started to drift off to bed. But not before every single one of them had come to tell me one last thing about their weekend. "I made a really good hat" Pam said to me. "I think Daddy is going to love wearing it. To work."

"I'm sure he will, Pam" I agreed.

Sam was next up. "So…that guy, was just there? At the beach? You don't know him?"

"No, Sam. He just wanted money. We'll never see him again."

And then Tray. "Mum! Look, I added an arm in. It's just an arm, because it burnt off one of the guys in the togas. Pretty cool, eh?"

"Yes Tray. Probably, uh, very authentic."

Felicia sloped in. "I wish you'd been here" she said quietly.

"Me too" I agreed. And I got a hug from her. That was nice.

"At least you had Amelia to look out for you" I said, and Felicia gave me a look that, I think suggested she had other ideas on that matter. And then she was off at a run. "Tray! Put that fucking sword back IN MY ROOM!"

Amelia was last. "I never want kids" she said. "They're too needy. And the dramas! Oh my God! Everything is, like, the end of the world!"

"Well, you don't have to have them. No one puts a gun to your head and says you have to be a mum."

"You did, though. You had loads."

"Yep, I did." Amelia didn't say anything to that, other than goodnight.

It was nice to see them all again. It was maybe even nicer to see Eric. "So, miss me?" I said to him, as I walked into the kitchen to do schedule night with him.

"Who?" he asked, looking up from his phone.

"Ha, bloody ha." I sat down opposite him.

"Of course I missed you Sookie. One more day and I think someone would have been voted off this island. I suspect Amelia was working behind my back to make sure it was me."

"Oh, they'd be lost without you."

"Yeah" Eric said, sitting back in his chair. "It works better with both of us though."

"It does" I agreed. Eric stood up to make coffee. "Oh, and thanks for taking Pam to Lorena's" I said. "She's been angling for that for a while, but I've been trying to avoid going. So that was nice of you."

"Mmm" Eric agreed. "Amelia set that up. I had to uh, fix her TV. Well, not fix. Push a button. Expertly, though. It was expert button-pushing."

"Uh-huh. Yeah. Judith said. She got an earful because Calvin didn't come around immediately, and even _Sookie's lover_ could make it, but Calvin had to work this weekend. So Lorena said that it was nice for me that I'd found someone who could afford to have weekends off, which I think was a dig at both of us. Me for being a money-grubbing whore, and Judith for not being enough of one. Nice she could get a two-for-one in there."

"OK" Eric said. "So you're only with me for my money?" He took some cups out of the cupboard.

"Yep. 'Course I am. That and your looks and…well, I was going to say charm, but that waxes and wanes. Not your dress sense anyway."

"Don't criticise the hat" Eric said, handing me my coffee. "You'll have Pam in tears. Again." He sat down with his own coffee.

"Oh, I'd never criticise the hat" I said to him. "Not when it matches your eyes so well. It's the silvery Lurex thread that really does it."

"Yep" Eric said, taking a mouthful of coffee. "It does." We heard a commotion in the hallway and Eric went out to investigate. "Like a fucking ninja, Tray!" he yelled, at full volume. I'd almost forgotten how loud he could be. "Bedtime is when you have to be a fucking ninja. I don't want to know you're there, got it?" I couldn't hear Tray's reply. Possibly he was trying to revert to being a silent ninja.

Eric walked back in and sat down again. "I have no fucking idea why they're all so fucking loud, sometimes" he said. I decided not to tell him. Again. Sometimes you just can't hear yourself.

Schedule night, which was often a chore, was actually OK this week. I guess not having seen Eric for two nights made it more interesting to be talking to him, even if we were only arguing over who was going to take Sam to cricket practice.

Plus, I had that sparkly hat to gawp at. I think Eric was worried Pam might get out of bed for a spot check on whether he was wearing it or not, so he still had it on. I hoped it was coming off at bedtime.

And it was even nicer when we got to bedtime and I really got Eric all to myself. Minus the hat, but with serious hat-hair. "I missed you" I said to him, cuddling into his side.

"So that means we're having sex, does it?" Eric asked me.

"Yeah" I said. "Definitely."

"I'm not a sure thing you know, Sookie."

"Uh-huh. Well, you better put out or I'll have you back on the street."

"What?" Eric asked, pulling away from me.

"Oh, Amelia. She thinks you're just here because I felt sorry for you and didn't want you to be wandering around out there by yourself, all lost and lonely. So, you know. You have to earn your keep."

"Uh-huh. Good to know, Sookie. Good to know."

'You're not hopeless though" I said to him. "After all, nothing really bad happened while I was away."

"No" Eric said. "Well, what could happen in two nights anyway?"

"Exactly. So we're good. But next time I go away…"

"This is in about five years' time, isn't it Sookie? Because I need a bit of time to regroup."

I giggled. "No I was thinking next month, actually."

"Fuck."

"Mmm. So next time, I was thinking I take you with me. It's the tenth anniversary for our civil union, after all. Tara said we can have the bach."

"What about the kids?"

"Dunno. We'll find somewhere for them, I guess. Just maybe not altogether. They're a bit of a…um. Well, we're used to it." I couldn't quite imagine any one person wanting to take on all five of them.

"Sounds fantastic, Sookie."

"OK, well that was all I was going to say. You can go back to the sex now, if you like."

"Or I'm out on the streets?"

"Not exactly."

"How's this?" Eric asked, and he leaned over and kissed me while pushing me back against the pillows.

"Pretty good" I admitted.

"And this?" Eric asked, and he grabbed for my breast and ran a thumb over my nipple.

"Very good."

"This?" Eric's hand had moved lower down and was between my legs, rubbing me through the shorts of my pyjamas.

"That I would classify as excellent, Eric."

"That's what I thought too."

EPOV

It was a relief to have Sookie home, and not just because it took two of us to get Tray to shut up and go to bed. It was good because it was Sookie, and I missed her when she wasn't here.

I had really missed her in bed. Cuddling her, obviously. I'd missed the cuddling. The sex was pretty easy to miss too.

All the stresses of the weekend melted away when I entered her. Sookie was warm and wet and welcoming and everything I needed her to be right then. It was lovely, it was perfect. It was us.

"I love you" I said, as I finished.

"I love you too" she said back to me.

SPOV

Sex was great. Sex made me feel fantastic. I did love sex with Eric. "You're definitely staying" I said to him, as we cuddled down to go to sleep. "Plus, now I've got you fixed you won't want to roam, or anything."

"Or anything" Eric mumbled, pulling me closer to him. Yeah, sex perked me up, but it made Eric a bit sleepy.

"It was a good weekend" I said to him, "But it's always good to be home. It makes you appreciate it, even all the fights and the dramas that aren't really dramas unless you're the one passionate about whether salad is actually a salad when it's mostly constructed from boiled potatoes and cooked chicken…" I stopped. I'd lost my audience. Eric was snoring behind me.

That was OK. He'd be here in the morning. I could tell him then. For now, I was just happy to be in Eric's arms and about to fall asleep in my own bed.

APOV

Never again! If Mum goes away again, I'm going too. It's so hard! And Dad is like, all over the place. He never even knew there was a freaking note on the fridge. Hopeless. Without me here, the whole weekend would have been a disaster. And I bet Tray would have been on the news instead of Mum. Probably as a missing kid, or a possible arsonist. You couldn't really tell with Tray.

Actually, maybe that was why she kept Dad around. Just so we had someone to keep an eye on Tray. That was probably one of his strengths. I guess Mum found him useful.

And she kept having sex with him. Leesh was right. They were noisy. Ugh. It was nice that they liked each other, but did they have to like each other _that_ much?

I guessed it was kind of sweet. If, like, you didn't know them. Or have to live with them. Or be related to either one of them. Then it was OK. If you just pretended they were, like, in a book or a movie, you could almost pretend that, like, they were a couple who were supposed to find each other and be together and really, like, _work_ as a couple. Because either one of them, on their own, was pretty mopey and annoying.

Together they were better. Just a bit loud. And grossly inappropriate. But that was OK. I mean I'd lived with it for, like, all this time now. I'd probably cope.

And when I grew up, I was going to make sure I found a guy who liked me that much too. Just maybe one who wasn't foreign. And who could read notes.

But who knew when to shut the fuck up and just wear a blue hat when he had to.

God that was a ridiculous looking hat.

**Thanks for reading!**


	58. Bonus 1: First in, first out

**A/N So here we go. This is the first bonus chapter, but I had a bit of a think and decided to do mini story-arcs rather than some really huge chapters that cover everything off. So I think (but, you know, don't quote me) that there will be two distinct story arcs we'll cover, which will go through a couple of specific points in time. That way I can get a feeling (if you guys let me know of course) of what people think of these storylines.**

**So here we've jumped seven years forward. It's December and Amelia is 21, Felicia 18, Sam 16, Tray 15 and Pam 12. I'll group all the chapters for this story-arc as Bonus 1, but I'll give them titles as well. Just because it's fun!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

Some days, it was just never-ending. Some days the constant invasions of privacy, supposed invasions of privacy, contests for space, for the TV remote, for five minutes of uninterrupted time in the bathroom all got too much for me and I wanted to move far away from here and just be…well, I didn't know. But that whole hermit in a cave thing, that was starting to appeal.

Eric just decided to mimic a hermit in his office from time to time to try to escape them all, but there was no escaping them. You couldn't escape them. They were big and noisy and for some reason thought we were responsible for sorting out all their petty arguments.

It was difficult to deny I had some responsibility, given that I had given birth to them all. But it was hard work and dealing with them all was enough to make me feel incredibly hot and bothered.

Although I tried not to think too much about that.

Mostly I just tried to get through each day as it came. That wasn't easy at the best of times, but in the lead up in Christmas it was almost impossible. I had so much to do and not enough hours in the day and Eric's catch-cry of "The internet is there for a reason, Sookie. Just do it all on-line" didn't help me.

So as I left for work to the sound of Sam banging on the bathroom door and shouting "You can't stay in there all day, Amelia!" and Amelia shouting back "I pay board! You don't! Piss off and LEAVE ME ALONE!" I wasn't thinking that I would call in and see Eric after work just so I could hide from the kids for a bit longer. No, it was only so we could discuss Christmas and all that involved.

And maybe just a little bit so I could hide.

I finished up the last class of the day at Jumping Beans, which were the babies. The babies were lovely, most of them couldn't crawl yet and they lay there while I blew bubbles and sang a song about elephants balancing on a tight-rope and while India and I, along with their parents, tickled them with feathers. Ah, those were the days. Before they get big and loud and…well, if I said obnoxious, would that make me a bad parent?

I loved them, but my God they were loud and annoying.

It wasn't loud in Eric's office. Not unless Eric was having a rant about something, anyway. These days he had people to rant at too; it wasn't just shouting at the computer screen. I couldn't decide if that made it more or less worrying.

His office was still in the same complex, but he'd moved to a larger one that was really two offices. The main part housed Diantha, who answered the phones. She was Irish and fond of running all her words together in jumbled and thickly accented long sentences. I often wondered how the hell Eric understood what she was saying and whether her employment had actually been the result of a mutual miscommunication which Eric hadn't yet figured out how to rectify.

And then there was Mustapha Khan, the young guy Eric had hired to help him out. Mustapha mostly adopted a resigned and incredibly stoic air. Maybe that was due to the fact Eric liked to tell him what to do, I couldn't tell. He tolerated Eric, and Eric only complained about him on a semi-regular basis, so it appeared to be working out.

On this day Diantha was sitting at her desk when I arrived. "Ohhow'reyeSookie?" she asked. I think.

"Good" I said. I was going to say tired, but nobody ever really cared, did they? I couldn't remember when I hadn't been tired.

"Hishighnesshisbackthere" she said, nodding at the door towards the back of the room. I walked around her desk and then past Mustapha's. "Hi, Mustapha" I said to him, and he nodded back to me, but didn't say anything.

As Diantha had indicated Eric was indeed in his office. I was about to sit down in the chair and launch into yet another discussion about whether buying Sam and Tray new iPads for Christmas was actually going to be seen as a Christmas gift by them, or whether they'd just whinge about us trying to pass off school supplies as Christmas presents, when I noticed that Eric and I weren't alone in the office.

"Who's that?" I asked him, nodding at the intruder. A pair of dark green eyes looked me up and down. Was it my imagination, or had I just been found wanting?

"What?" Eric asked, tearing his eyes away from the computer screen. His hand was still where it had been though. On her.

I sat down in the chair. "Her" I said. "Who's your new friend?"

Eric looked down at the sleek black cat lying on his desk. "Him" he said. "Aud."

"Who called their cat Aud?" I asked Eric. I couldn't see a collar. Not even when he raised his head to appreciate the scratch behind the ears he was getting from Eric. And I could tell that _he_ was some kind of pedigree, but even so, that head just seemed way too small to belong to a male. Maybe it was that I knew about males with big heads, or maybe I just knew about cats. Whatever the reason I was sure that was a female cat.

Why was Eric hanging out with a female cat?

"I did" Eric said, scratching him or her but most likely her, under the chin. "Well, he's not my cat. But he comes in here every day." That's when I noticed the crumbled-up muffin sitting on the paper bag it had come in next to Eric's arm. Eric put another muffin crumb in front of the cat, who purred before snaffling it up. Uh-huh. That might have been what the attraction of hanging around Eric was then.

Slut.

"But you're a dog-person" I blurted out. "You like dogs."

Eric shrugged. "We have lots of cats, Sookie."

"Yes, but you just tolerate them. You only like Ivan, and only because he knows you're in charge of him. The cats just think you're a large warm space to lie on."

Eric gave me a level look. "Aud's OK" he said.

"Why is she called Aud in the first place?"

"_He_ is called Aud because it's short for Auditor. He comes in and audits my work." Eric resumed stroking his new friend's chin. She fixed me with a triumphant look. OK, maybe I was reading a little too much into that.

No, no I wasn't. That cat _knew_. She thought she'd won.

"So, I'm not allowed to even breathe on the stacks of paper that litter the place, but that cat is allowed to wander all over them, and it's just called auditing?" I asked.

Eric rolled his eyes. "It's cute" he said. "It's like she's actually interested in what I'm doing and not just concerned about the trees I might have murdered."

"Uh-huh. Yeah, alright. I suppose she's fascinated by the process of bull-shitting for a living, because she's bull-shitting you. She's only here for the food!"

"I think you're getting a bit worked up about a cat" said the man who, I knew well, had more than once entered into staring-competitions with Stan just to prove who was the toughest in the house. Honestly, I couldn't see the point in it all. And I couldn't see why he was so suddenly interested in random, only-here-for-the-snacks cat when he'd never, ever cared this much about Bob. And Bob had been lovely.

"Bob was lovely" I said to Eric.

"Bob was Bob" Eric replied. I interpreted that to mean that Bob was mine. Well, that was true. I had him before I had Eric and maybe I should have stuck with Bob. Maybe I shouldn't have let Eric into the house and then it would just be me and two girls who were pretty much adults and the noise level would be so much nicer, not to mention the fact I wouldn't be going through two loaves of bread, at least, a day. I'd done it all wrong and now I was paying the price and this cat was going to rub my nose in it.

I took a deep breath and prepared myself to try to convey some of this to Eric. And then I stopped.

Why was I getting so worked up about a cat?

Oh, yeah. Christmas.

"We need to sort out presents" I said in the end. "Ones that will preferably prevent any bickering on Christmas day about who got the best stuff and who got stuck with something stink. And Tray is a problem because we've only just had his birthday."

Eric sighed, and I was pretty sure Aud turned around and gave him a look of deep understanding. Well, she would. She didn't have five almost grown-up people waiting at home to ambush her and demand to know what was for dinner, like I did.

Eric sighed. "So are we still thinking iPads for the boys?"

"I guess" I said, without much enthusiasm. Something wasn't right with me. I didn't know what.

And I really, really didn't like that cat.

At home that night, things weren't much better. Well, they were about the same as they ever were. So that meant there was fighting, swearing, unlawful pilfering of food from the pantry, mock contrition when the food was discovered missing, more fighting, more swearing, something crashed over in the boys' room, someone crashed over in the hall, a cat was stood on, possibly more than once, or more than one cat, someone's feelings were hurt, someone else was triumphant in their victory and, to round it all off, there was some more fighting and swearing.

I lived with a tribe of barbarians.

When the chief barbarian deigned to leave his office and his Sphinx-like companion and come home to join the rest of us in fighting to be heard, he ignored all the noise and walked straight into the bedroom. I was particularly impressed because Eric's announcement of "It's me!" from the front door had been eclipsed by Sam shouting "I will fucking kill you, you cock!" at Tray.

Eric had ignored a lot of things over the years, and sometimes even I had to admit there was merit in his hands-off approach. But I had begun to wonder if sometimes it was because that, as the boys got bigger and bigger, he was starting to doubt his ability to actually get in between them and physically break them up. Gone were the days of being able to hold one under each arm if he had to. Now they were both almost as big as he was, and even less co-ordinated. There was always some collateral damage in any of their fights, whether it was property, a pet or an unsuspecting family member who happened to chance on them. If they really wanted to damage each other, then we were kind of stuck with it, and could only hope that the winner finished his rival off fairly cleanly and we weren't stuck with too many hospital bills.

Amelia had long washed her hands of them and, now that she was officially a grown-up and earned her own money, she'd decided that she could pretend none of us existed most of the time. How that really worked when she was still living here I wasn't quite sure, but despite all Eric's mutterings about free-loaders or the times he left the flats to rent section of the newspaper open on Amelia's bed, she hadn't yet decided it would be a great idea to actually move out.

I wasn't entirely sad about that.

Felicia, though, liked to wade into her brother's arguments at any opportunity and this evening was no different. "For fucking fuck's sake!" she yelled. "Shut the fuck up or fuck off. If I hear you again, you will fucking know about it! Do you understand me, you dumb-arse losers?"

I didn't hear Sam or Tray's reply to that. I just hoped that that wasn't how they were teaching Felicia to talk to students at her university course. She wanted to be a P.E. teacher and was in her first year of a Bachelor of Education.

Surely, by the time she was actually placed in a school, she would have learned to modify her language?

Pam sloped into the kitchen to join me. Of all of them, she was the quietest at times, which worried me. I thought she was finding the journey into adolescence difficult. Possibly because even at 12, she still looked like the little girl she'd always been. She was petite and still had the air of a finely crafted porcelain doll, despite the pink stripe she had down one side of her hair. An unauthorised pink stripe that she'd convinced Amelia to help her create by telling Amelia that it was a temporary dye. It wasn't, and Amelia had quickly washed her hands of the whole thing, saying she was only following instructions. Eric hated it, but there wasn't much we could do until it grew out. In the meantime she'd had to wear a lot of French plaits to school in an effort to make it look less obvious.

"Did you need anything?" I asked her. She shrugged, and looked around. I figured she was looking for Eric, but these days she thought she was beyond the mad head-long rush to greet him at the front door like she'd done when she was little. They'd all done it when they were little, but none of them were little anymore, and some of them were quite big.

Pam left and Tray thundered in. "What's for dinner?" he asked. He didn't seem to be showing any signs of trauma from his previous confrontation with Sam. I shouldn't be surprised; he could more than hold his own really.

"Corned beef" I informed him, as he huddled over the slow-cooker.

"Sah-weet!" Tray said happily, and then he was off again. Amelia came in.

"How was work?" I asked her.

"Aaargh!" she said, expressively. "It was…God! I was just all over the place today! Because you know we've got that thing, right? Next Tuesday? So I won't be home that night? The thing at the cinema?"

I nodded. I remembered the thing, it was one of the many things Amelia had on now she worked for a public relations and events company which specialised on putting on things for other companies.

"Yeah, so I had, like, all the invitations printed out, white on black. Because it's a black and white theme and we're showing the black and white movie…yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'd printed them, and they looked pretty good because the idea was that they look like the cards that come up in the really old silent movies, the ones with the dialogue, with those, like, little scroll borders around the edge, you know?"

I would have said yes, but Amelia's pause was simply not long enough. She carried on. "That was _my_ idea, because we had that meeting and I came up with it, but no one remembers _that_ now, do they? Anyway, I'd had them printed and then stupid bitch-face Nadia came along and said that they had to be black on white, so that it matched the posters at the cinema, and I said she was wrong, because we discussed that in the meeting, and I had said, specifically, white on black when I'd explained the idea. But _no one_ remembers that now, just like _no one_ remembers that it was my idea in the freaking first place." She sighed, noisily. "So I went and asked Phoebe, and she was like 'of course it's black on white, Amelia. I'm sure we discussed this' and I felt sooo stupid about the whole thing." She sighed again, and stared at her hands.

"It's just one lot of invitations" I said to her, even though I knew it didn't work like that in the corporate world, and that she was desperate to prove herself to the company's owner Phoebe Golden and eventually get promoted from dogs-body to assistant to the assistant, or whatever the official job title was.

"I just don't want to look stupid. At work" Amelia muttered, and then Eric walked into the kitchen.

"How was work, Amelia?" he asked. "Did you help lots of middle managers spend their entertainment budgets before the end of the year? Maybe decorate a Christmas tree or two in colour-coordinated baubles?"

"S'alright" Amelia said. Possibly she was a bit wary of being asked, once again, if they were actually paying her to work, which was Eric's lead-in to suggesting, less than subtly, that she move out of home.

I was keeping out of that one. As much as I sometimes thought a few less people around here might be nice, I also realised that I didn't want Amelia to go. Because that would just make me feel old. And I felt old enough already these days.

EPOV

The house was fucking crowded and Amelia needed to go. She just didn't see that she needed to go and Sookie seemed to side with her. For maybe the first time since I'd moved in I started to wonder if I was finally going to see Amelia and Sookie silently form a unit and exclude me. I watched Felicia for signs that she wanted to join them in the 'Eric is always wrong about everything' splinter-group, but so far she hadn't managed to tear herself away from telling her brothers what assholes they were for more than about five minutes, so I didn't think she was going to defect any time soon.

It wasn't that I didn't want Amelia around; it was just that it was time for her to leave us. Someone had to go and, as the eldest, Amelia got pole position on that front. We couldn't live in a house with all these people for much fucking longer without there being real damage to said house. Or one of its occupants, although to be blunt, mostly I was fucking worried about the house. Tray and Sam thought nothing of crashing about all over the fucking place and one day they were going to crash right through a fucking wall. A fucking wall I had paid for.

So we needed to start reducing numbers, pronto. First in, first out seemed a damn good way to work it too. It wasn't like Amelia didn't earn anything. She earned a pittance, because that woman she worked for seemed to believe in slave labour and Amelia had her heart set on working in a business that was all about parties. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that she seemed to spend all her salary on shoes and clothes to wear to these parties. She was always a bit vague about where her money went, and more than once had hit me up for gas money for the car I'd fucking bought her, but Pam let me know the treasures that Amelia's wardrobe held. Treasures that Pam herself, I suspected, was occasionally allowed to extract in order to maintain silence about where all the money went.

I'd had some hope that she might leave with the boyfriend she'd had, but instead she'd started a campaign to be allowed to have him practically fucking move in here. That wasn't going to happen, not if I had I anything to say about. And I did, because it was my fucking house. Sookie's argument that if we didn't let him stay they'd just be off somewhere else didn't really wash with me. That was the fucking point. If they wanted to have sex, they could do that somewhere else. And pay rent there. Rather than the token amount of money for 'board' that Sookie extracted from Amelia's paychecks.

But they'd split up. And we still had Amelia. Only now it was crying, mopey, snivelling Amelia.

I walked into the kitchen and found her sitting at the kitchen table talking to Sookie. She didn't seem to be forthcoming about what she'd been doing at work. She was busy at the moment though, with the Christmas parties and functions and she looked tired. I decided against bringing up the whole moving out issue again. Maybe in the New Year.

Sookie was mashing potatoes. "I'll do that" I suggested, and she handed me the potato masher.

"Managed to get away then?" Sookie asked. "I thought you'd be stuck with your business advisor?" It took me a moment to figure out who she meant.

"Oh. Aud. Well, he had to go to wherever the fuck he goes for the nights."

"Who's Aud?" Amelia asked.

"Eric's cat" Sookie spat out.

"Not my cat" I said, testing the potatoes to make sure they were mashed enough. "Just a cat that hangs around the office."

"Who called it Aud?" Amelia asked.

"Who called who Aud?" Felicia asked straight after, as she came into the room.

"I did" I said. "I'm sure he has another name, but he must be missing his collar. Aud's short for auditor."

"Who'd call a cat Auditor?" Amelia asked.

"He did bubble-brain" Felicia said to her. "He just said he did. No wonder you stuff up at work all the time, if your listening comprehension is that poor."

"Oh, shut up Felicia. You're not a teacher yet" Amelia said, and she looked upset. I gave Felicia a warning look. She ignored it. It wasn't the first time that had happened.

Sometimes I worried I was losing my grip on them all. They were…well, fuck. They were kind of like adults. Even the boys at times, although you wouldn't know it when they were taking turns to smash each other's head into the floor, or trying to see who could ride a shopping cart the fastest through the parking lot at the supermarket. Sometimes it was fucking difficult to control them all. And I was fucked if I was losing control. Reducing the numbers seemed a much better way to go.

"It's got nothing to do with being a teacher" Felicia said. "It's got to do with not being an idiot. When you can manage that, maybe you'll get what's going on around you even if it doesn't concern what colour streamers to hang and if they have to match the paper napkins. And whether cloth napkins would be better. And whether the tables should have candles or flowers. And whether they have to match the napkins or the streamers…"

"Piss off" Amelia said quietly, and then she walked out of the room.

"That was pretty mean" Sookie said to Felicia, as she poked whatever it was in the slow-cooker. I peered at it as well. Corned beef. Tray would be happy.

Felicia shrugged. "She can take it. And if she can't, she can find somewhere else to go." And then she left the kitchen as well.

"I wish" Sookie said, as she grabbed some plates out of a cupboard. "That you would stop giving Amelia such a hard time about moving out. The others are starting in on her now."

"Well, you have to admit Sookie, she's been working for nearly a year now. It would be about time…"

"Yes, yes. We all know, Eric. You left home at 18 and never went back, blah, blah, blah. Maybe Amelia likes it here? With her family? Is that such a bad thing?"

Sookie was pissed off and I thought…well, I hoped it was only partly to do with me. She'd been pissy a lot recently and her visit to me that afternoon had been tense for some strange reason. She didn't like the cat that visited me, and I didn't know why. It was just a cat. We'd had lots of cats. Some of them more retarded than others, for sure, but they were all just cats. Hardly anything worth worrying about unless they pissed on the furniture or disembowelled their friends on the carpet.

But Sookie was upset and I could only imagine that the extra stress of Christmas was getting to her. That and the fact there were so many people living under one roof. This brought me back to the same old problem of someone needing to move out, and me being blamed for pushing someone out.

Was I pushing someone out?

"Maybe she'll blossom if she has to actually stand on her own two feet a little bit more?" I suggested.

"Oh! Bite me, Eric!" Sookie said, and she stormed out of the kitchen. That was…completely unexpected, and totally unlike Sookie. It was like Amelia when she'd been younger, a bit like Amelia now. Felicia had had her moments too. But Sookie didn't do that.

I was fucking confused, about every fucking thing. And they wondered why I liked hanging out with a cat.

SPOV

I didn't know the last time I'd felt such overwhelming anger towards someone. Possibly not since I was a teenager and Jason had pissed me off. I know a few times he'd tried to blame the fact I yelled at him on my hormones, but it wasn't my hormones. It was Jason. He was really bloody annoying and so was Eric at the moment.

I got as far as the hall though, and realised I had nowhere to go. Not really. And it was dinner time. And I didn't want to know what happened if I fed Tray and Sam too late in the day, but I suspected it would be worse than an invasion of gremlins.

So I turned around and walked back to the kitchen, still feeling hot and grumpy about it all. Eric was still standing there, still licking the potato masher like it was a giant freaking Popsicle and that just made me mad at him all over again, so I walked straight through the kitchen and into the laundry like I was heading there all along.

And then I rattled the laundry basket on top of the dryer so it sounded like I had something to do in there too.

I was 52 years old and I might as well have been 12 like Pam.

I counted to ten. I counted on to twenty. And then I walked back to the kitchen. Eric was still there, watching me. Was he smirking, I wondered? Because if he was smirking at me I was going to take that potato masher and ram it right where the sun didn't shine.

Gosh, I was having a bad day. I tried to dial it down a bit. Took a deep breath.

"You can slice the corned beef" I said to Eric.

"You sure you don't want me to bite you anymore?" Eric asked. I did an internal check at that statement. Did I want to punch him or laugh? Punching him had a slight lead, but maybe that was because of the previous comments about getting Amelia to leave home. I knew she was 21. I knew she had a job and earned, well, not exactly a good wage, but something, anyway. I knew that eventually she'd have to go.

But if we could just get through Christmas, all still under the same roof, and without any murders, that would be nice.

"Ha ha" I said in the end, and I picked up a spoon so I could put dollops of mashed potato on everyone's plates. Or mountains for some people.

Eric sliced the beef, but he kept looking at me. I wished he would keep his eyes on the knife. Honestly, if he cut a finger off it would serve him right.

Sam walked in. "Is it dinner yet?" he asked.

"Any minute" I replied.

"Tray still alive in there?" Eric asked him. Sam shrugged. "He takes up too much space" he muttered. "When's Ames leaving home?"

I watched as Eric gave a small shake of his head, and Sam's eyes flicked to me. He dropped his eyes to the floor and looked a bit chastened. I got the beans out of the microwave.

"Oh. But I got the job" Sam said. "I start next week."

"Good work" Eric said to him.

"Are they going to give you shifts and things?" I asked, as I taste-tested the mustard sauce. I needed the details so I could plan, I supposed. I wasn't sure how this was going to work, Sam working evenings. It was OK now it was the school holidays, but it might be different during the term.

"I guess so" Sam said, shrugging.

"Are you gonna give me freebies?" Tray asked, coming in to the kitchen and invading my personal space while he checked out the sizes of everyone's portions. It was nice when they wanted to be near me, but a little distance wasn't a bad thing either. Tray was quite big these days, and although his personal hygiene was showing signs of improvement it still wasn't always pleasant when he was that close to you.

"Fuck off" Sam said, without any malice. "Don't bother turning up because I'm not feeding you for fucking free."

"I am" Eric complained.

"Yeah, but you like me, eh?" Tray said, as he grinned at Eric. There wasn't really much Eric could say to that.

"What's this about free food?" Felicia asked.

"I got the job at Burger Wisconsin" Sam said. "And now dickwad over there thinks it's a fucking free-for-all."

"No I don't, but you know…family discount?" Tray tried.

"Get fucked" Sam said to him.

"Poor you" Felicia said to Sam. She almost sounded like she actually meant it. "They'll all be there you know. Watching to see what you fuck-up totally. You know it's coming." I wasn't sure whether that was actual sympathy or not.

"Like when you drop plates all over the floor?" Sam asked her. OK, they were getting in digs with each other again. One of Felicia's jobs was at the café near where we used to live. From what I could tell she was the most disinterested waitress ever, but they hadn't fired her yet. Not even for the times we went there for brunch and she would yell pointedly into the kitchen "My mum's here. Better start burning that bacon now, Geoff!"

So I liked my bacon crispy. If I asked any other waitress for my bacon that way I didn't get eye-rolling and lectures on how it wasn't good for me like that. I wasn't sure that being related meant that you were immune from good customer service. Eric didn't think she was that bad, but that was because he got extra hollandaise with his eggs benedict, as Felicia knew how much he liked it that way.

It was nice for some.

"Fuck up, Sam" Felicia said. "It's not like anyone's going to want a burger you made. Except him", she gestured to Tray. "And I've seen him fight Ivan for bacon that fell on the floor."

"I didn't fight Ivan" Tray said. "He just wasn't that quick. Three-second rule still applies."

"There's no such thing as the three-second rule" Eric said.

"Nah, you're wrong" Tray told him. He sounded pretty adamant. Eric decided to let that one go.

I called the others and we sat down. Tray was shovelling food in by the time Pam joined us. "How was your last day at school?" Eric asked.

Pam shrugged. She wasn't thrilled about leaving intermediate and going to high school for some reason. I wasn't sure why; lots of her friends were going to be going on to Epsom Girls' Grammar with her. I had all summer to worry about it though.

Along with everything else.

Maybe I could send her to work with Amelia? Pam liked parties, and party planning. Maybe we could start our own thing, take your little sister to work day?

Maybe it was just that I had another week of Jumping Beans classes and knew that Pam would be a killjoy if I had to take her with me. Small kids weren't really her thing, possibly because she'd been the small kid in the house for over 12 years now. Unlike everyone else, she hadn't had to see other babies arrive.

And she never would now.

"It was alright" she said. "You know, it was just a half-day and we had the big assembly last week…so, I just said goodbye to everyone. Came home. Hung out. That kind of thing."

Amelia's phone, which was next to her plate, buzzed. She checked the screen. "Bugger" she muttered under her breath.

"I don't think we need that at the dinner table, Ames" Eric said, which was a bit rich coming from him.

"Yeah. But you're not my boss" Amelia said. "And I need to go and phone her." She left the room. Tray glanced over at her plate. "No, Tray!" Eric said, in much the same tone of voice he'd use to admonish Ivan.

Well, sometimes they both needed clear direction. Tray shrugged, and went back to eating his own food. I mentally added up what my grocery bill was going to be like by the time I'd had the boys home for all of the summer holidays and realised that not only did I really need Sam to be handing over all of his wage to me, but I needed both Tray and Pam to get jobs as well to help fund the family food budget.

Maybe if I sent Pam to work with Amelia they could pay her for being dogsbody's apprentice.

"So what else is happening?" Eric asked the rest of us still at the table.

"I got a job" Sam said. I guess he was proud of that and wanted more of Eric's approval.

"Yeah, yeah" Felicia said. "I have three." As well as the waitressing she baby-sat some kids in the afternoons and then spent her Saturdays running Soccer 4 Tots classes at the Girl Guide hall. It was the same classes Eric had taken her to when she was a tiny little thing who'd just learned to walk and run. Life was odd that way.

Sam frowned at Felicia, but didn't say anything else. "There is one thing" Felicia said. "Well, two things really. One is that I got a new job too. I'm going to be working on this project to move all the books in the library at Pam's school. I got it through Student Job Search, just for the summer. I am awesome." Sam gave her another dirty look, probably wishing he was as prepared as she was to toot his own horn.

"Good" Eric said. He was in all in favour of the kids having jobs, possibly so they could all leave home as early as possible. No, I had to stop thinking like that. No one was leaving home. Amelia was happy and that was great. After all, by the time I was her age my parents were dead, and Eric had left his home because it wasn't really home. We should be happy Amelia liked it here so much, that she was comfortable living with us, even if we weren't always comfortable with the fact she was an adult who wanted to do adult things with other adults. I thought we should have let the last boyfriend stay over, rather than have Amelia trek off to his grotty flat and stay overnight, but Eric was pretty adamant that it wasn't happening under his roof. I think he'd like to pretend it wasn't happening under any roof, but I couldn't deny what I knew.

But she was my daughter, and I loved her, and she could stay here forever if she wanted.

"And what else?" Eric prompted.

"Oh yeah. So I'll have a bit more cash. And I'm moving out" Felicia continued. "It's pretty crowded here."

I was pretty sure the next sound I heard was my heart breaking.

**Thanks for reading!**


	59. Bonus 1: Two for one deal

**A/N Well I'm glad everyone seems to be enjoying the time-jump. It's always a bit daunting have to figure out where everyone is at when I do that. So big thanks to you all for reading and reviewing. This chapter has a new point of view - Felicia. I think it's about time we heard from her.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

The colour drained from Sookie's face, but I don't think anyone else noticed. Maybe they didn't care. She bit her lip and I was pretty sure it may have wobbled. Fuck.

"I get your room" Tray said, in between mouthfuls of potato.

"No! I get it, dick" Sam said to him.

"I don't care" Felicia said shrugging. "I won't be here. But it's really close to them" she nodded at me and Sookie. "So…you know…"

"Whaf?" Tray asked.

"Dick" Sam said again.

"I don't get what the problem is with where the room is."

"Um…you know? Dad _snores_" Felicia said, pointedly. And it was a blatant lie anyway.

"So?" Tray said. Felicia rolled her eyes and looked pained.

"Yeah, exactly. You snore too, you dick" Sam said to him.

"You're both dicks, and you can fight over it all you want. But not until after I've left. Until then it's off-limits and if you come in I'll murder you, got it?"

Sometimes I worried that Felicia wasn't going to be cut out for teaching. I had other worries about the moment, though.

"Where are you going?" I asked her.

"Oh. Flat. With Rubio…and some friends of his. They got this house, cheap, in Royal Oak. Belongs to Parker's gran and she's gone into a home, like Nana did, so the house is ours if we do it up. Needs a paint."

"What do you know about painting anything?" I asked her. It really wasn't as fucking easy as she thought it would be.

"Jesus Christ, it's just _painting_" Felicia said to me. Yeah, she had no fucking idea. She'd be bored in about three minutes and then she'd come home, away from the paint fumes.

"So, it's shitty, this place?" I asked her.

Felicia shrugged. "It's OK. Only has one bathroom."

"I don't think…" Sookie started to say, but then she stopped, and put her hand over her mouth, before quickly looking down at the table. Oh, fucking crap.

"Your mother's right" I said. "I'm not sure it's such a great idea. I mean, with Rubio?" Yeah, I didn't really like that one. I didn't really like any of her boyfriends, and she'd had a lot over the years. At first, Sookie and I decided they were more like friends. Felicia just seemed to prefer hanging out with males. That was…well, OK-ish, I guess. I got used to it. Sookie telling me I didn't have a choice about getting used to it didn't really help. I'm not sure anything fucking helped.

But then the boyfriends got more serious, which made Amelia particularly pissed at Felicia. For some reason, I'd thought Amelia would be the one who'd be out all the time and having to be dragged home. Maybe because I'd brought her back from a drunken party when she was only 14.

That seemed to have put her off the party lifestyle. I wished, belatedly, that I'd dropped Felicia off at a drunken party when she was 14 when she started staying out on her own. Maybe it might have opened her eyes up to a few things. In the end, I was stuck with the boyfriends and the parties and the fact that she very rarely wanted to come home.

Then she didn't want to come home at all, well, she wanted to be allowed to come and go as she pleased anyway. And that was something I wasn't going to agree to. Arguing that Amelia was allowed to stay over with her boyfriend at the time was a fucking weak argument when Felicia was three years younger. And I didn't like that Amelia did it, so I wasn't going to extend it as a fucking general rule to every fucking member of the household. Except Edward. Edward could fuck off and find himself a girlfriend and I wouldn't give a shit if he never came home. I did give a shit about Felicia, and the fact she wanted to run off with random boys and do some things I didn't even want to fucking contemplate.

If I'd known it was going to end this way, I would have fucking put a stop to her following that Sebastian kid around, that was for sure.

In the meantime, I tried to keep a lid on the whole boyfriend situation. It hadn't worked. Felicia had just blown the fucking lid off.

"What's wrong with Rubio?" Felicia asked.

"What's right with him? He likes you for a start" Sam said, and he got a swift swat to the back of the head for his trouble. "I bet you don't do that to him" Sam muttered.

"No. I like him. You I just…I'd say tolerate, but it's barely that. Still, not my problem after Saturday."

"You're going Saturday?" I asked.

"Yep" Felicia said happily. So that was two days away. Fucking fantastic.

"Can I move out when I'm 18?" Pam asked suddenly.

"No" I said, automatically. No, I didn't need to spend the next 6 years trying to keep Pam bolted into her room as well.

Pam adopted a rather sulky expression but didn't press the point. Thank fuck for that.

"It's not compulsory" Felicia said. "It's just I want to."

"Want to what?" Amelia asked, coming back in to the room.

"Move out" Felicia replied.

"You're…moving out?" Amelia asked, as she stood behind her chair and glared at Felicia.

"Well, duh. That's what I said."

"You're too young" Amelia accused. "You can't move out. They won't let you." She pointed at Sookie and me in case we didn't know who the 'they' in that sentence referred to. I might not have minded the fact she made us sound like a couple of jailers quite so much if I hadn't got the feeling I was about to be a really shit jailer and lose a kid.

It was too late to put fucking bars on her window now.

Probably.

"Yeah, they will" Felicia said confidently. "Dad moved out at 18. He's always saying that." Mmm, that was true, but perhaps slightly out of context. I said it to Amelia, who, at 21 should probably be out of the house. I didn't say it to the 18 year old to encourage her to go.

"That was, probably, into some, uh, supervised halls of residence. At university. Not a flat" Sookie said. It was nice she was joining in the conversation, but maybe she was a little off the mark. I nodded though, to show we were both on the same page. What Sookie didn't know about…had quite likely never happened. Let's just go with that.

"Phfft, whatever! Doesn't mean I can't go flatting" Felicia said.

"No. You can't" Amelia insisted.

"Yeah. I can" Felicia said. "You're not the boss of me Ames. You're barely the boss of yourself. That Golden woman who keeps phoning you, she's the boss of you and you're just annoyed you're stuck being someone else's bitch."

"Shut up!" Amelia said, angrily. "At least I have a real job, and not just a bunch of odd-jobs."

"Meh. Whatever" Felicia said, shrugging. That really fucking annoyed Amelia.

"Just sit down Amelia" I said to her. "Eat your dinner. No one is going anywhere tonight, so there's no point fucking arguing about it."

"Well I'm going Saturday" Felicia said, as Amelia sat down, while still glaring at Felicia.

"And I get your room" Sam said quickly.

"No, you get Amelia's room. I get Felicia's" Tray said. "You always say you're bagging Amelia's room when she goes."

"But Amelia's not going!" Sam pointed out.

"Tough shit" Tray told him. "That's the one you said you wanted. That's the one you get."

"Hey" Pam said, breaking into their fucking dialogue. "Where'd Mum go?"

Sure enough, Sookie wasn't sitting with us at the table any longer. Fuck it all to hell.

SPOV

I wanted to say something. I wanted to put up a really good argument about why going flatting in a grotty old house in Royal Oak was going to be a dumb idea. But I just couldn't. I felt too hurt about the whole thing.

It wasn't supposed to be Felicia who went first. It just wasn't. I could totally understand Amelia's reasoning on the subject. Amelia was going, sometime…at an unspecified date, and the rest of them were staying indefinitely. That was the plan. Why was it no one else's plan?

Somehow Felicia always managed to blind-side me with stuff. Like getting her period when I just went away for a weekend. And some other stuff I tried really hard not to think about, even four year's later. She was even worse at surprising me than Tray who once had a weta as a pet in his room for about six months before anyone discovered it, and I'd had a hell of a shock when I went to have a clean-out of their wardrobe. Telling me that Eric had known it was there and was totally cool with it, hadn't really calmed me down. But that seemed minor now in comparison to Felicia just abandoning us.

Why the hell did I spent so many years doing head-counts if they were all just going to run off at the first opportunity? OK, so Tray had spent years running off, but he'd never gone far. And he'd never actually planned it out. And he hadn't looked so bloody defiant when he'd been announcing the fact that he wanted to get away and not love us anymore.

I left dinner, and I went and sat on the bed and I felt…bereft. And she hadn't even gone yet. How bad was Saturday going to be if this was the reaction I had to just the news of her leaving?

After a while I figured dinner was over because Eric came in and he sat next to me. I half expected him to ask if I was OK, but he didn't. I wasn't OK. Guess it showed.

He put his arm around me, and I leaned in and put my head on his shoulder. And then I cried, which was stupid, because I was crying for something that hadn't even happened yet. It was bad enough feeling this tragic over something that had happened, but this just seemed infantile.

I still did it though. And I couldn't stop. I was so sad. Sad and stupid. And old.

After a while Eric said "I think she'll be home pretty quick. No one likes painting. It's a shit job."

And though I knew that not everyone was actually made in the image of Eric Northman, I laughed. And maybe I felt a bit better.

The next morning though, I might have been feeling vindictive, or possibly suicidal, because I went into the boys' room, with the vacuum cleaner, at 8.30 in the morning. I did not get the warmest reception.

"I'm on HOLIDAY!" Tray yelled, without raising his head off the pillow.

"Yeah, but I'm not. And I want to get this done." Well, I had to get this done. Now that I was in their room, however, I may have changed my mind about that. I looked at all the…stuff they had spread everywhere. I hoped there weren't any more wetas lurking. Darth Vader had been bad enough.

And was it sad that I remembered that the weta had been called Darth Vader?

"Shut up Tray!" Sam said, and he at least looked up. "I'll do that" he said to me, with a smile. "Later on."

"No, I'm doing it now" I said to him. "So, up. Come on."

"But, Muuum!" Sam said, giving me the look that was supposed to make me change my mind. "We don't have to get up."

"Yeah, you do."

"No, we fucking don't" Tray muttered into his pillow.

It was like trying to persuade some very large, lazy cats to get themselves moving…lions perhaps. I wasn't having much luck moving these lions at all.

And then the loudest lion in the pride stuck his head around the door. "Get the fuck out of bed!" he said, and there were sighs from the lumps under the covers, followed by some shuffling around as they managed to get upright. There were a few dirty glances thrown my way, but I ignored them.

Eric kissed my cheek. "I'm going" he said. "See you later on?"

"Yeah, maybe" I said, and then I switched the vacuum back on, causing Sam and Tray to hasten their exits from the bedroom and go in search of some food. There went the rest of that loaf of bread.

By mid-morning I'd cleaned everything I could think of apart from a few spots in the family room, but I couldn't be bothered trying to prise Sam and Tray off the couch and away from the X-box long enough to really get in there. I sat down for a cup of tea instead.

I wondered if I should start packing up stuff in Felicia's room. How would that be viewed? As pushing her out or helping? And if I didn't do it, maybe she'd come home tonight and be totally over the whole idea and wouldn't feel she still had to leave on a point of pride.

Pam came in. She'd been in her room most of the morning. She was always pretty good at amusing herself.

"You should go outside" I said to her. "It's a lovely day."

She shrugged. "Sunblock" she said, quietly. Yeah, no one really liked the routine of being smothered in sunblock, and, sadly, no one needed it more than Pam did.

"Well, what would you like to do?" I asked her. I figured I had better make the most of having one daughter at home still. One who wanted to hang around with me, anyway.

"Nothing!" Pam said, heavily.

OK, so one who had no choice about whether to hang out with me or not.

"We could bake?" I suggested. Pam looked less than enthused. And then I had a bright idea.

"We could make a Christmas cake" I said. "Gran's Christmas cake."

"Your gran?" Pam asked me, I nodded. She didn't seem impressed, or particularly unimpressed, really. They were so far removed in time that Gran meant nothing to Pam.

"Yeah, why not? Every time I try to make it, it goes a bit wonky. But we can figure it out together. I'll get the recipe down."

I pulled one of my prized possessions off the shelf beside the sink, the old exercise book which held all of Gran's recipes, hand-written or cut from magazines. I knew that Aunty Linda had been quite keen on getting hold of it herself, but she already had her own copies of most of the main recipes, anyway. Lots of the things in here I'd never even attempted, especially the recipes for household cleaners. I always meant to, it was supposed to be better for the environment, after all.

Maybe Pam and I could do that in the New Year. In the meantime though, Christmas cake it was.

Pam looked at the page I put in front of her, and the recipe written out in Gran's ornate hand-writing. No one wrote like that these days, hardly anyone wrote long-hand after all. The writing was fading now; I wondered how much longer this book would last.

"Is that it?" Pam asked.

"Uh-huh" I said. "Gran won a prize for it, when she was younger. She was always proud of this cake."

"They give you prizes for cake?" Pam asked.

"Yeah, they do. Sometimes. So anyway, shall we do it?"

"OK" Pam said, and we went through the list of ingredients, all the peel and dried fruit it said we needed and we got ready to hit the supermarket. Sam and Tray didn't look that upset at our leaving. In fact I found them standing in front of Felicia's bedroom door arguing.

"I'm older" Sam said. "So I get it."

"Nah" Tray said, adamantly. "You get our room. Because you're older. Plus I need quiet, to study and stuff."

"You'd get quiet if I moved out of our room" Sam countered.

"No one's moving anywhere" I said, to quell the argument.

"Leesh is" Tray informed me. "Tomorrow. So we need to decide today who gets it. I gotta pack."

Sam snorted. "You'll just kick your shit all the way down here on the floor" he said to Tray. Tray shrugged.

"Don't do anything while we're out, OK?" I said to them, and they made a bunch of noncommittal sounds that could have been interpreted to mean anything. They weren't Eric's sons for nothing.

Pam and I went to the supermarket on Dominion Road and picked up what we needed. "Anything else you want to do while we're out?" I asked her. I hoped it didn't involve shopping; it was getting pretty busy at the shops in the run-up to Christmas.

"We could go and see Dad?" Pam said.

"He might be busy" I warned her.

"We could take him lunch?" Pam suggested. "Dad likes that." Yeah, he did. Well, he liked it whenever someone gave him food for free.

So we drove up to the Mt Eden village and bought some food at the bakery, and then walked down to Eric's office to see him.

Diantha was sitting out front again. "Ohhow'ye" she said.

"Hi!" Pam said brightly. It was nice to see her happy. She really liked Diantha, well, she was admiring of Diantha's eclectic dress sense and the fact that Diantha let her steal all the post-it notes and highlighter pens she wanted. She was pushing her luck the day she wanted to bring the whiteboard home, but that was more to do with Eric putting his foot down, rather than anything Diantha had said.

"We brought lunch. For Daddy!" Pam said. It was kind of sad when she reverted back to her old, perky, little-girl persona. It made me all the more aware that these days most of the time she was a silent and watchful almost-teen and didn't seem to be having as much fun.

Still, I'd got two girls through adolescence, I was sure I could get Pam through as well. And then she'd want to leave home, and me, too.

I felt all hot and grumpy again. I was really going to have to stop blaming Felicia for doing something…well. Something she was supposed to do. I mean, I had left Gran and gone to London.

Oh God, please don't let any of them move to London.

"Tha'salovelyweebagdere, Pam" Diantha said, and Pam beamed and showed off her handbag. She had a thing about bags and the Guess one she was carrying had been a birthday present. Of course we'd been informed she really wanted a Kelly bag. Eric had thought that sounded perfectly acceptable until I made him Google it and he discovered it wasn't anything to do with Barbie's baby sister, but was a really expensive Hermes handbag. There'd been a few choice words about designers fleecing idiots who were prepared to pay those prices said at the computer monitor, and then Eric had broken the bad news to Pam that she had to set her sights a little lower.

Eric, probably hearing the voices and coming out to be nosy, or oversee his employees as he liked to think of it, appeared. "Daddy! We brought lunch!" Pam announced.

"That's great" Eric said, trying to look at what food I was holding.

"Oh" Diantha said, turning in her seat to look at Eric. "Dattingcametroo.  
>FromyourmanintheStatesdere. ShallIsenditontrootoye?" I mentally ran that back in my head and I could see Eric was probably doing the same, 'That thing came through. From your man in the States, there. Shall I send it on through to you?' was the translation I came up with.<p>

"Yes" Eric said. I hoped he'd come up with the same translation, or maybe he just said that to everything Diantha asked.

"Actually" he said, after a moment's more thought. "Print it out and give it to Mustapha."

"I'lljus'senditontrootohim, so" Diantha told Eric, clearly not relishing the idea of printing out an email and walking three steps with it. Over Diantha's shoulder I could see Mustapha roll his eyes. I wondered how many pieces of paper got passed around the office under Eric's say-so.

"Um, yes" Eric said, as authoritatively as he could under the circumstances.

Eric and Pam headed back into his office. I was going to join them when Diantha said to me, conspiratorially, "HeSkypedmeearlier, 'salovelylookin'fella,isn'the?"

Oh. Although I'd never met Clancy, I had seen photos of him. Officially we were Facebook friends, but I had a feeling that wasn't because Clancy particularly wanted to be my friend, it was more that he needed a back-up way of contacting Eric in case Eric decided to play dead and went incommunicado. It had happened before when Clancy pissed him off. So I wasn't sure I would have characterised Clancy as 'lovely-looking', but it was nice he had a fan, I supposed. "Mmm" I said.

"Yeah, bestnottosayaroundhishighness" Diantha said, giving me a wink. OK. I figured I'd just go and see what Eric was doing now.

He was sitting in his office while Pam re-organised his stationery drawer for him. "See? It's nicer if the highlighter pens make a kind of rainbow, so the blue goes next to the green, then yellow, then orange, then pink" Pam said to him. Some things never changed. That was nice. Change sucked, quite frankly.

I unpacked the food and Eric went back into the main office to get coffee from the machine for us. I heard the swearing at the machine, and then Mustapha walked over and told him how to work it and Eric huffed a bit, and eventually came back carrying two cups.

I hoped to God Mustapha never got a better offer.

Pam told Eric all about the Christmas cake. "So, this year I'm making it because Mum says she stuffs it up. I hope I don't."

"I'm sure you'll be great, Pam" Eric said.

"Yeah, it's complicated though. You have to soak the fruit and stuff."

"And hide it from the boys" Eric added.

"Crap" Pam said. "Yeah."

We had finished the food when we were joined by another presence in the office. "Kitty!" Pam yelled out, and Aud blinked several times at the noise. Yeah, she hadn't met Pam. This might put her off.

"How come you've got a cat, Dad?" Pam asked, trying to corner Aud to pet her. Aud side-stepped her and jumped on the desk, but with a certain amount of effort.

"That cat is quite fat" I said to Eric. "I'd stop feeding it muffins for a start."

"He's fine" Eric said, scratching Aud's chin.

"I thought it was a girl cat?" Pam asked.

"Nope. That's a boy" Eric replied.

"Uh-huh" I said. "I feel like we've been down this road before. What's the female version of Aud?"

Eric thought for a moment. "I guess you add an 'a'. You were pretty adamant that was the rule for naming the girls."

"Mmm" I mused. "So you could end up calling them Ames, Leesh and Pam. That worked out." Eric shrugged, and I continued. "I think Auda sounds a bit odd" I said, although I was aware it was kind of stupid to be discussing a made-up name for a cat I didn't even like. Still, it took my mind off other things. And the cat probably had a perfectly normal name at its real house.

"Audie?" Eric said. "Like your name?"

"Still sounds like a boy" I pointed out.

"Which he is, so it's not even worth discussing really" Eric said.

"Mmm" I said. "I wonder where she lives?"

"Oh, down the road, I guess" Eric said, airily. "There are a lot of houses, after all."

There were, so she probably had a nice home. A home she didn't want to leave. Because she wasn't an idiot who thought an old house in Royal Oak was much better than her family home.

And in the meantime she could act like a trollop in here with Eric and then go home for dinner. I still didn't understand why I didn't like her, but I just didn't.

After a while of Eric trying to work and pat Aud and basically ignore Pam and me we went home and started on the cake. Sam and Tray had gone out, somewhere. The note was kind of vague. The house was quiet with just Pam and me in it.

Guess I should get used to that.

"You don't want to leave home, do you Pam?" I asked her.

"No" she said. "Not today."

Well, that was the problem. This was the last day we were all going to be here. But Gran's recipe didn't call for soaking the fruit in tears so I had to hold it in.

"This is going to be the best cake ever!" Pam announced.

"Yep" I agreed, wiping my eyes quickly. "It will."

"And if Tray tries to eat any, I'm going to stab him with a knife."

Maybe Eric was right and we did need more distance from each other. I wasn't sure the cake was going to be improved by blood either.

"Let's just tell him it's poisonous until it's been soaked properly" I suggested. That might work.

"Phfft" Pam said. "He ate a worm once. I don't think anything poisons Tray. Except maybe broccoli."

"We'll say we soaked broccoli then. What's next on the recipe?"

FPOV

My family sucked. Probably everyone says that about their family, but in my case it was true. It sucked to be in the middle of them all. Sucked big-time. I was so looking forward to leaving and just…not having to deal with them on a daily basis.

But Amelia thought I'd done something terrible and broken all the rules. She hated it when you broke a rule, although most of the rules were in her head. It wasn't my fault she was the eldest and wanted to spend her money on a bunch of stupid dresses to wear to stupid functions where everyone could treat her like she was stupid. She wasn't even that stupid…most of the time. She just did stupid things because she thought she had to.

I didn't go home for dinner on Friday night. I was out with Rubio and we went to look at the house. It was old. It was really ugly on the inside. The bathroom looked like it hadn't been changed since before Mum was born.

It was going to be fucking awesome. For one thing, no more fighting or listening to Mum and Dad have sex. I doubted anyone would want to have sex with Parker, so we were probably safe on that front.

More to the point, I could actually have sex without worrying about anyone catching me, or having to stay at Rubio's parents place. They were slightly cooler than my folks, well, they tried to be, and they didn't mind me staying. But it was pretty fucking awkward in the mornings when his mum made me breakfast. Even my mum had stopped making me breakfast.

I'd told Rubio I wasn't fucking making him breakfast when we went flatting and he laughed. I hoped he didn't think I was joking. I wasn't going to turn into his mother, or my mother who despite the lack of breakfasts still fussed about making sure everyone got fed. And God knows, the boys were really big enough to look after themselves. And Tray would eat cardboard if you let him put tomato sauce on it, so it wasn't like he was going to starve.

But I was going. And it was going to be awesome.

If we could just find someone else to take the third bedroom. The one that Parker's mate was supposed to have, but now he's not leaving his girlfriend because she's pregnant. Which was fucking annoying for me.

When I got home the house was pretty dark and I assumed most people were in bed. Amelia wasn't though; she was still sitting at the table in the kitchen with a coffee.

"Were you working?" I asked her.

"Yeah" she said, quietly. "But Phoebe said I didn't have to stay to the end of this one, which means that bitch-face Nadia and Chelsea are going to take all the credit for everything."

Well, her job was boring and I didn't really want to discuss it, so I stayed quiet and hoped she finished that topic. I got myself a glass of water. I'd had some Thai food and it had made me really thirsty.

"I can't believe you're going. Tomorrow" Amelia said in the end.

I sighed. I didn't really want to hear what she thought about me breaking her stupid rule that wasn't even a real rule.

"I'm not doing it just to piss you off" I said, sitting down with her. "I just want to go. Now. And the house is cheap."

"So, you think you're going to stay with Rubio?" she asked me. I shrugged. I had no idea at all how that was going to work out. He was nice enough, I guessed, but I didn't exactly think I was going to get married and have 500 babies with him. I couldn't really imagine wanting to do that with anyone.

Amelia did. Well, not the babies. But she'd probably get sucked into that. She wanted the whole relationship thing, but she picked really shit guys who said they didn't want a relationship and then…well, then she found out they weren't lying. She was such a numbskull about that stuff. She really should have stuck with Riley, but she thought there was something more exciting out there and now most of the guys she dated she couldn't even bring home.

If just sleeping with them counted as dating them. Thank God Mum and Dad didn't know she was going through, what Amelia called, her promiscuous phase. It was pretty gross for me to think about and I was her sister. Unfortunately, Amelia occasionally decided that part of being sisters was that we got to share. Details. Yeah. Ick.

I hadn't yet decided what was worse, hearing Mum and Dad's sex life taking place, or hearing about Amelia's sex life after it had happened. Either way, it wasn't really surprising I wanted to move away from them all was it?

"I dunno" I said. "I mean, I like him. And we got the flat 'cos it belongs to Rubio's mate, so…" I did like Rubio. He was training to be a P.E. teacher like me and we just clicked. But I didn't know if I wanted to stay with him forever. For now would be OK, I figured. I mean, I was only 18. It wasn't like I had to make a life-long commitment.

Just because Mum had married her first real boyfriend didn't mean that was going to work for the rest of us.

"He probably thinks you're going to stay together" Amelia said.

"No, that's you. You're the one who thinks everyone's going to marry you."

"Shut up!"

Sam walked in. Well, shuffled in, which was preferable to the thundering around he did some of the time. It was still horribly wrong he was taller than me. Tray was too. I mean, I hadn't been thrilled with Sam…ever, really. But it might have been nice if he'd stayed a size where I could actually still hold him down and deal to him if I had to.

I really hated it that they were so bloody tall.

"Everybody shut up" Sam said, which just made me so angry. He did it every friggin' time, and he wasn't Dad, so he should just stop trying to be Dad.

"What do you want?" I asked him.

"Duh. I live here. What do you want?"

"Um…I haven't moved out yet. So where's Tray? You win the Russian Roulette game over my room?"

Sam shrugged, and then Tray did appear. He was never that far behind Sam. Certainly not in height. Bastard. If Mum had just waited a bit to have me then I might have been at least six foot. OK, maybe I wouldn't have _exactly_ been me, but close enough. At least I wasn't as short as Amelia who really hated that everyone called her short-arse now. Still, she'd probably have Pam to look down on forever.

This was weird, because Pam should have gotten the tall genes. I didn't know how that worked and I probably hadn't paid enough attention in Year 11 Biology classes to ever figure it out now. But I was going to blame that guy Felix for that, the one that sat next to me. He spent all that time telling me jokes when the teacher was talking and I couldn't concentrate at all. So, yeah. Not like I really need it now anyway.

"What have you losers been doing?" I asked them. Because that was polite.

"I'm not a loser" Tray said.

"Yep. That's just what a loser would say" I informed him.

"No one around here ever grows up, do they?" Amelia asked the wall. The wall didn't care and didn't answer.

"Shut-up short-arse" Tray said, leaning over her so she tried to push him away. He was bloody hard to move these days because he was so fucking solid. It was like trying to move a pile of bricks who grinned at you and made stupid comments and smelt of B.O. I guess we knew where all that food had gone over the years.

True to form, Tray was opening the fridge now. "I'm pretty sure you got fed" I said to him, and he didn't say anything other than "Oooh. Leftover corned beef."

"I think that'll be for tomorrow" Amelia said, because someone had to be the leftover police. Well, maybe they didn't have to be, but Amelia wanted to be, which was just bizarre. If she just shut up and let him eat the bloody corned beef then Dad could do all the policing. Sure, it'd be after the fact and there'd just be ranting and it hadn't stopped Tray yet, but I didn't think we needed to get involved.

I almost didn't live here anyway.

Was I going to have to label all my food in the fridge at the flat? Crap. That might be…better. At least Tray wasn't going to be there to eat it.

Did you have to tell your siblings where you lived?

Mum would tell them. So he'd turn up sometime. Maybe I could get a small fridge and hide it in our room?

"Euw" Amelia said, as Tray emerged gnawing on a big chunk of beef. God, he was gross.

"Just hanging around" Sam said, out of the blue. And then I remembered I had asked them what they'd been doing. I hadn't really cared when I'd asked, and I really didn't care now. They didn't lead particularly exciting lives.

"We went to St Luke's" Tray said, and Sam looked at him like he was an idiot. Well, he was an idiot. I almost felt sorry for Sam being stuck with him all the time, but Sam was an idiot too. Mostly I felt sorry for me. "Sam got yelled at. By a girl!"

"Shut up" Sam said.

"It was pretty fucking funny" Tray informed us.

"What did you do?" Amelia asked Sam.

"I didn't do anything!" Sam insisted. "She just went mental!"

"Was it a girl you know?" Amelia asked. She was way more interested in this than I was. I was trying to work out if I was allowed to take my chest of drawers with me. I mean, it was my chest of drawers, and they weren't going to be using my room as a spare because one of the boys would have it, and they had their own drawers…so yeah. Totally allowed, I thought.

"Sort of" Sam said. "I knew her friend."

"And..?" Amelia prompted. I gave her a look, she ignored it. As well as bothering me with crap about her life she liked to know all about everyone else's life too. It was just bizarre. Who the fuck cared that much about other people?

Well, Mum. She was bordering on being meddling neighbour-woman, and I think it was only Dad and his inability to play nice with others that stopped her being in everyone else's business all the time. Dad's death-stare could put a lot of people off. Bizarrely though, not Mum, who just acted like it wasn't happening and that it was perfectly normal to have a large, grumpy American following you around shouting and swearing and giving people the evils.

I guess for her it was.

"I don't fucking know!" Sam said, sounding really pissed off.

"But you must have done something" Amelia pressed. "Girls don't yell at you for nothing."

"You do" I said to her. "You get excited over fucking nothing all the time."

"Leesh, if we're talking yelling I'm just going to say one thing. Pot" Amelia said to me. That wasn't my fault. It was hard to be heard around here. I realised I was going to have to not shout in the flat. It had been bad enough that time I'd had dinner at Rubio's and his family thought I ate fast. Well, I did eat fast. If you didn't, Tray stole potatoes. But I didn't think it was worth laughing at me for.

So I was trying to eat slower. But old habits were hard to break.

"She got all shitty about texting" Sam said in the end. Tray sniggered next to him. "She called him a dick" Tray said. "Right in the Foodcourt."

"Shut the fuck up, Tray" Sam said, and he got the look that came just before he really lay into Tray. This was when I should step in and do something, but honestly, could not be fucked tonight.

Sam backed down anyway. Mainly because Amelia started up again. "So, what? You texted her something…oh! You didn't send her gross naked pictures did you? Of your bits?"

"Oh, euw! Amelia!" I said to her.

"Well, it happens. Lots of people do it." Don't say it, I thought. Don't say you've done it. Thinking about Sam doing it was bad enough.

But she gave me a smile and didn't, thank fuck, say anything. I guess she didn't want the boys to know what a slut she could be.

OK, maybe that was mean. But I just…well, I didn't like that she kept hooking up with all these sleazy dudes. The last one was in his 30's. She met him at some function and they went to a hotel, probably so his wife didn't know. But she can't see it. She thinks she's in some stupid story and she's the heroine or something. But dudes like that; they're not going to call you back.

And then she gets depressed and we all suffer.

"No!" Sam said. "No, but…oh, you know…she thought I would…text her, not send her pictures, 'cos she gave me her number…a while back…"

"How long ago?" Amelia said, sharply.

"Dunno. I guess…about a month? I was hanging out with some other guys, and she was there, and she put her number in my phone."

"And you didn't text her" Amelia finished. "You twat."

"What?' Sam asked. "What'd I do?"

"You're a complete fucking moron" I informed him. It was nothing new really. "Did you say you would text her?"

"Well, yeah. Because she gave me her number, and stuff. So I was going to. Sometime. And that's what I said. You can't put a date on 'sometime'. She's just a bit mental."

"You're a bit mental" Amelia said.

"Men-tal!" Tray yelled, in his best special needs voice. Christ, he was inappropriate.

"Shut up, Tray" I said, and he sat there licking his fingers to get the last of the beef juice off. And then he went to put his hands down, but Amelia shrieked. "Don't touch the table! Go and wash your hands!"

"Why?" Tray asked.

"Germs" Amelia said. Stupidly, because then Tray wanted to touch her and she shrieked again. I stood up from my chair, grabbed his arm as he was hovering over a cowering Amelia and tried to get him in an arm-lock. That was harder than it used to be, and he wasn't even really fighting me. Bastard.

"Just fucking go and wash them, Tray" I said, and he wandered off. I kicked him, not too hard, in the backside as he left, and he gave me the finger. Meh. He'd done worse. I sat back down again.

"I still don't see what _I_ did wrong" Sam complained. "She just yelled for nothing."

"Jesus Christ, and you wonder why you don't have a girlfriend" I said to him. Sam was pretty hopeless. Girls, bizarrely, really liked him and kept throwing themselves at him and he had no clue at all. He just wandered around with his head up his arse while they all clawed each other's eyes out to be allowed to sit next to him at McDonald's or something. It was really, really bizarre. I mean, it was Sam for a start, and anyway, how could anyone be that oblivious to the outside world?

Judging from some of the stuff I'd caught him looking at once, I was almost a hundred per cent sure he liked girls, he just couldn't tell when they liked him. At this rate, he was staying here forever.

This would make Mum happy, because he was her favourite. Well, not favourite, although I'd thought that when we were younger, but she did like him and fuss over him. Maybe he was just waiting until he could find a girl like Mum. Euw.

"She had problems" Sam said, and he stood up and starting walking off.

"You've got problems" I told him, and he gave me the finger too. Yeah, I wasn't going to miss some of the things around here.

"Sam!" Amelia called after him, and he turned around. "Next time, just text the girl. Or don't take her number. You're supposed to make a freaking effort if you like them." Sam didn't say anything; he just walked out of the room.

"Well, you won't get this tomorrow night" Amelia said. "You'll be all alone with no one to talk to."

I shrugged. "Rubio will be there."

"Yeah. You think you're so special because you've got a boyfriend, don't you?"

"Maybe if you stopped dating, or sleeping with, dicks, you'd have one too. Find a guy with a proper job for once."

"Joe had a job."

"Importing party pills is not a job, Amelia. It's just fucking dodgy." Boy, she was lucky Dad hadn't heard about that guy.

"That was just one of the things he did" she said sniffily. And then she sighed. "I can't believe you're going" she said again.

"It's not a rule you have to go first, Ames. Just because you're the oldest. Maybe this is my turn. I mean, you did everything first. You got to school first, and High School. How many uniforms did I get with 'Amelia Compton' written in them? You never had the hand-me-downs."

"I guess" Amelia said. "Now I'm used to being first."

"Yeah, like Pam's used to declaring her wardrobe is vintage. Sucks to be Pam, really."

"Uh-huh" Amelia agreed.

"You rode a bike first, you learned to swim…well, float, first. You were the first one allowed to baby-sit."

"_Made_ to baby-sit. You know what Dad's like."

"Well, whatever! I had to come second for everything."

"Not everything" Amelia said to me. "You had sex first."

OK, so that I wasn't proud of. And it was a secret. And we didn't ever, ever talk about it. Except that I shouldn't have told Amelia who could only keep her mouth shut about her own secrets and not anyone else's.

I shrugged. It felt like a long time ago now. Maybe I didn't have the best judgement with guys either, but I liked to think I was getting better. I worried Amelia was getting worse with the guys she was picking. She'd at least had Riley and he'd been happy to wait to have sex. Which was a good thing, because fourteen was too fucking young and Mum had hit the roof when she'd found out. From Amelia of course.

We hadn't spoken to each other for a month after that, but, mostly, it was water under the bridge now.

"Well, so? Sometimes I go first. It doesn't kill you, does it?" I asked Amelia.

"No, but it feels really wrong" she grumbled. "You're my baby sister. It was bad enough when you slept with that guy, but you shouldn't be leaving."

"If I'd gone to uni in Dunedin or something, I would have left at the beginning of the year" I argued.

"That's different" Amelia insisted. "That's just…going to Otago. Not actually leaving home."

"Same diff, Ames."

"I might miss you!" she suddenly spat out, like I was doing something wrong and it was all my fault she was going to be miserable. No wonder all the guys she was with cleared off if she made them feel like that. It felt really crappy to suddenly be responsible for Amelia's happiness.

And then I had the most brilliant idea.

"So come with me. There's a spare room, still. Rubio was going to see if his cousin wanted it, but you could have it."

Amelia looked at me. "I could?"

"Well, only if you promise not to annoy me too much. Because without Dad around I might be tempted to murder you in your sleep."

"The only reason you don't kill me is because you're scared of Dad?" she asked.

"Yeah. Well, mainly I want to murder the boys, but sometimes it's you. But Dad'd find out and I don't even want to think what that punishment is."

"Wow. I would have thought jail might be the deciding factor, but OK, whatever works for you. I wouldn't visit you in jail anyway. And who wants a sister who's a convicted murderer? It'll look really bad when I finally make it to the social pages in the Herald and that's what they say about me" Amelia looked at me sideways and we both laughed. Yeah, of course me killing someone would upset her life.

"So you want it? The room?" I asked.

"It might upset Mum too much. If we both went."

"Yeah…but Dad'd be thrilled. It would be like a two for one deal."

"They'd have a spare room again."

"See, no one ever blames Pam for that, do they? Really, as long as they've got her at home they'll be fine."

"I'll miss her" Amelia said.

"Because she paints your nails for you."

"She does a _really_ good job! And she does patterns these days, look!"

Yeah, I didn't really care about Amelia's nails, but I looked. Pam had done a good job.

"I suppose I could go" she said. "How much is it?"

"Three hundred, plus bills. And you have to buy your own food."

Amelia considered it. "OK" she said. "Here I just subsidise what the boys eat anyway."

"Because you pay _so_ much board?"

"Shut up."

"You shut up."

"Are you going to learn to shut up when we're living together?" Amelia asked.

"Nope" I said. "Because my big sister taught me that the last word is everything."

"Shut up."

"You shut up."

And then Dad walked into the kitchen. "Everyone shut up" he said.

I might miss that.

**Thanks for reading!**


	60. Bonus 1: Careful what you wish for

**AN So this week my life sucks and all attempts to write are being thwarted. Potions morning at school didn't help. Yeah, that wasn't as much fun as it sounds. No Professor Snape for a start. Just a bunch of five year olds running rampant with cornflour and food colouring and a really big mess to clean up at the end. I'm not really sure they learnt much other than that ****if you try to drink your oil, water and food colouring 'ocean in a bottle' it's probably much like drinking some of the real ocean - not recommended.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

I walked into the kitchen to find Felicia and Amelia deep in conversation. At least they weren't screaming at each other. When they'd been tiny, and it had just been the two of them, the screaming had been pretty bad at times. Amelia would take offence at almost anything Felicia did, and Felicia would delight in screaming right back at her. Some days I thought my ears might bleed, there was so much fucking screaming over absolutely nothing.

And then it died down for a few years, which was nice. Until it started up again as they both became teenagers. That really wasn't fucking nice at all. That I could have fucking done without.

But sometimes I wasn't sure what was worse. The screaming, or the…well, I'd like to say talking to each other, but it felt more like conspiring. I wondered what they'd been cooking up. I hoped it wasn't anything else that was going to upset Sookie. She'd been fucking miserable all night and we were all suffering. Well, I was suffering. Maybe not suffering, so much, it was just that I didn't like it when she was upset. And there really wasn't anything I could fucking do to make it any better. I'd learned that the hard way. Telling her that one less kid in the house was going to make her life easier just brought the wrath of Sookie down on my head, and it wasn't my fucking fault. I didn't make Felicia move out, and I couldn't stop any of them getting any older.

Except maybe Pam. She didn't seem to doing that thing when they suddenly want to act like teenagers and have posters of weird looking boy pop-stars on her wall, or giggle at everything, or want to hang out at the mall 'WITH MY FRIENDS!', or…anything that the others had done really.

I liked Pam. More to the point, I liked that she wasn't trying to replace me with some grunting teenage boy with bad acne and worse dress-sense. Clearly, I'd done something right with Pam. I knew there was a reason we'd had her. It was so I could put everything I knew by then into the last kid and have someone who was all mine, forever. Yep, yay me.

I kind of wanted to share that thought with Sookie, but there was every chance, that as the leader of the 'Eric is always wrong' society she'd feel the need to disagree with me on principal. So I stuck to giving myself a mental pat on the back about Pam and then went back to worrying about Felicia.

The paint was bound to send her home. I mean, she'd never shown any interest in re-decorating since I'd known her. She wasn't likely to start now. So it'd be fine. A five-minute wonder. She'd get sick of that boyfriend, and hate the smell of paint and there'd be one too many squabbles over whose turn it was to make dinner. And then she'd come home, find she didn't have a room anymore and…fuck. Well, the plan didn't go that far. Maybe Amelia would miraculously move out in the meantime?

"So what are you two doing?" I asked them, as I got the glass of water I'd come into the kitchen for.

"Breathing. It's allowed" Felicia said to me. Yeah, it was. But that answer, that said a fucking lot really. It was pretty clear Felicia was still just a teenager at heart.

"Well, tomorrow you can go and breathe someone else's air" I said to her.

"I'm going too" Amelia said.

"Going…where?" I asked. I figured this was the part of the conversation I'd missed. They didn't often socialise together, but every so often they'd hang out, or go out with each other. It usually ended in tears, or at least some screaming. Maybe we were throwing Felicia a farewell dinner or something? If so, I hoped Rubio wasn't invited. The kid was OK, but I didn't really want to hang out with him. It was better if he just stayed in the background and then I didn't have to confront what it was that he did with Felicia. It was just better not to think about the fact Felicia was sleeping with him. I tried very hard to just pretend that didn't fucking happen.

When it was completely out of sight, and Rubio wasn't coming around here anymore, I'd probably be better at pretending. That was my hope, anyway.

"With Felicia. To the flat."

"You're helping her move?" I asked. I might have expected the boys to offer, mainly to make sure she actually left. But I didn't think Amelia would put herself out for her sister.

"No!" Amelia said, and she gave me that fond smile she did sometimes. I hadn't minded so much, until I'd noticed that it was very similar to the smile Sookie gave Edward when he forgot how the fucking cat flap worked again and he just sat there hitting it with his paw and she had to open the whole fucking door for him. I was suspected that sometimes, well, maybe a lot of the time, Amelia thought I was missing a few brain-cells.

"I'm moving out" Amelia said. "You can start celebrating."

"Just not too loud, eh?" Felicia added.

"I'm hardly going to throw a party, Leesh" I said, and Felicia rolled her eyes, while Amelia kept smiling at me. "So you're going too?" I asked Amelia.

"Yep. It'll be fun!" she said, brightly.

Felicia rolled her eyes again. "It'll be, um…well. We had the spare room" she said. I guessed maybe her sister hadn't been her first choice of room-mate.

"So Rubio's still going with you?" I asked. I could hope.

"Yes!" Felicia said.

"And you're moving out too?" I double-checked with Amelia.

"Yes. Because I hear, from a very reliable source, that it's about time I got my own place and stopped being such a _burden_ to you all."

"I think I'm being misquoted" I said to her.

"I was quoting Felicia, but fine, you all wanted me out."

"You keep eating all the brie."

"I like brie!"

"So basically, in essence, by this time tomorrow night you will both be ensconced somewhere in Royal Oak, inhaling paint fumes and enjoying brie that one, or other, of you have paid from your own wages?"

"Yeah" Amelia said enthusiastically. "We have to label our food, in the fridge" Felicia told her. Then she paused. "I hope there's a fridge" she said.

Well, that was unexpected. "So has anyone told Sookie?"

"No, we just decided it" Amelia said. "You can tell her."

Oh, I was not fucking taking the blame for this one. Sookie was going to be devastated. "No, I think you should tell her."

"But she's in bed" Amelia informed me.

"Mmm, she's still awake. I'll, uh…I'll bring her out here." I walked out of the kitchen and down the hall to our bedroom. Sookie was sitting up in bed reading. I would have much rather just taken the book out of her hands and tried to find the pornographic passages, but we'd better get this over with. She was bound to notice when Amelia didn't turn up for breakfast on Sunday morning…well, she'd notice by Wednesday for sure.

I always noticed when Amelia wasn't here for breakfast and I can't say I wasn't looking forward to not knowing one way or the other. If she wanted to stay...over somewhere else then that could be her business.

"What?" Sookie asked.

"Oh, um, Amelia has something to say."

"Now?"

"Yeah."

"And I have to get out of bed?"

"I think you'll want to know" I said to her.

Sookie frowned, and put her book down. "Why do I get the feeling I don't want to know?" She swung her legs out of bed.

"It's not that bad" I said to her. I didn't need her jumping to any conclusions. Too late.

"I'm not old enough to be a grandmother!" Sookie wailed, as she looked around for her robe.

"That's not the problem."

"So it's a problem?"

"More of an opportunity."

"You're just really confusing me" Sookie grumbled. "I hope Amelia isn't this confusing."

I shrugged. Sometimes Amelia was really confusing because she forgot to pause for breath and all her sentences just ran together. That was always difficult to follow.

We walked out into the kitchen to find Amelia still sitting at the table and Felicia nowhere to be found. Guess she'd decided to leave her sister to it. Maybe they weren't as good at sticking together as I'd hoped.

"What's up?" Sookie asked.

"I'm going" Amelia said.

"Going where?" Sookie asked. You would have hoped that Amelia would have learned, after her rather inept attempts to inform me of what her plan was, that brevity required clarity as well. Context would be nice.

Predictably Amelia rolled her eyes. Then she stood up to take her cup to the dishwasher. "With Felicia."

"You're going to clean the place?" Yeah, Sookie was confused. It was incredibly tempting to step in and re-phrase it, but that would just draw Sookie's inevitable objections my way. No, I was keeping out of this one.

I started to back towards the door. Just a step or two. I might have made it out if I hadn't collided with Tray. He had the worst fucking timing.

"What's happening?" he asked.

"Nothing that concerns you" I told him, as he tried to push past me. "Why are you out here anyway?"

"Hungry."

"Go to bed Tray."

He sighed, and walked off. "See?" Amelia was saying. "_That_ I won't miss."

"You're…leaving?" Sookie asked quietly.

"Yeah! Felicia said I could have the spare room at the place she's getting. I think just because she'd be lonely without me, you know? It's kind of scary moving out. Well, for her. She's only 18 after all."

"OK" Sookie said, and I waited for what else was coming. "We'll go out, in the morning."

"What for?" Amelia asked, as she re-adjusted the way the dishcloth was placed on the counter.

"I'll, um. I'll buy you the things you'll need. We'll take Felicia. I'll get you some linens and stuff. Cleaning supplies, that sort of thing."

"Oh, cool!" Amelia said enthusiastically. "Thanks Mum. And then you guys can celebrate." She looked at me. "I know this'll make Dad's Christmas, won't it?" She gave me a big grin.

And then it hit me. They weren't going to be here. For Christmas. Fuck.

SPOV

Hearing that Amelia was going to move out wasn't what I expected, but it was better than some of the other options that were available to me, like pregnancy, or being pulled over for drink-driving after one of those parties she had to attend.

It did kind of make sense; they'd have each other, so they wouldn't be totally alone. For all the fighting, and the bickering and the screaming and everything else that went on between them, they did really like each other. I hoped. Well, I had to think that or else I might worry about my skills as a mother.

Eric was worried about me, though. As soon as we said goodnight to Amelia he just kept looking at me, watching my every move, as though I was about to explode right in front of him.

I wasn't, I felt strangely calm. Well, I felt a bit hot. My skin was really dry. I wished Eric would stop looking at me like that. I was wondering whether if I hit Eric repeatedly with my book he'd stop looking at me like that. I ended up getting out of bed to go and put some more moisturiser on my face. I really didn't appreciate Eric asking me if I was OK when I came back out of the bathroom. I probably regretted saying "I'm not crying, if that's what you think" in quite such a grumpy voice to him, but I was fine. I told him I was fine. It wasn't my fault he didn't believe me.

"Are you sure?" Eric asked, as I got back into bed.

"No, Eric. I just say these things because I think it's what you want to hear."

"Well, see. That's what worries me. You can tell me, if you're worried."

"Of course I'm worried. I worry about them every day of their lives. But I'll be OK with them moving out. Toilet brush." And I did feel OK. It was like I'd had such a long time to get used to the idea of Amelia going, I was now fine with it, and somehow her going with Felicia made that better too.

"What about the toilet brush?"

"We'll have to get them one, tomorrow" I said. It was all very well that Eric wanted to discuss how worried I was but I was busy trying to think of everything we might need to buy, and what I'd have to bribe Felicia with to get her to the shops with us, and to stop her having a stand-up argument with Amelia half-way round K-mart. Plus, it was hot. I threw the covers off me. That was better.

"Where are you going?" Eric asked.

"Nowhere. I'm just hot."

"You are hot" Eric said, snuggling into my back.

"Back to your side of the bed" I said to him.

"But you're fine" Eric said. "I want to be where all the fine people are."

And then something occurred to me. I might be fine, but maybe Eric wasn't. "They'll be OK" I said to him.

"Mmm" Eric said, into my hair. That didn't really tell me a lot.

So I lay there and I wondered why it was I felt reasonably OK about it all. I couldn't come up with an answer really, other than if I _really_ thought about it the worst thing I could think of was Felicia threatening to throw Amelia's hair-straighteners out the window if she didn't stop hogging the bathroom. That had already happened. More than once. I didn't really feel like I would be missing anything if I didn't see it again.

As I expelled another breath of air, hoping to cool down my face which seemed to be boiling now, I decided that I'd be sad to see them go. Really sad. I'd miss them around the place a lot. But Eric had been right; it wasn't fair to keep them here just to satisfy my need to keep my family all together. It was hard work being a mother, you gave birth to them and you tried to keep them safe and with you, and make sure they didn't want to wander into any danger.

But I hadn't been able to stop Felicia having sex at 14, and I wouldn't stop her moving out at 18, and taking Amelia with her.

"I wonder if Felicia will take Sockie with her?" I asked Eric, but Eric had gone to sleep now. I felt really hot. I hoped he rolled over soon.

Next morning, Felicia was less than enthused about the shopping. "I have to pack" she said, surveying the piles of crap in her bedroom.

"Yeah, but we need to clean the place first" I said to her.

"Clean?" Felicia asked me, like I was speaking a foreign language.

"Uh-huh" Amelia said. "I am _not_ sitting on a toilet seat where a whole bunch of random people have put their bottoms."

"Um…how do you think flatting works, Ames?" Felicia said. "Jesus fucking Christ you're a princess sometimes."

"Try without all the fucking cursing, Leesh" Eric's voice said from the hallway, but he didn't come into Felicia's room. Felicia pulled a face at the doorway, but it was pretty pointless. And to be honest, Eric had been like a bear with a sore head all morning, he was better off out there while we were in here. As it was I could hear him yelling at Tray "Get the fuck out of bed, Tray!" I didn't hear Tray's answer, but I could guess what he thought about being told to move his arse at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning during the school holidays.

"Is he mad about the drawers?" Amelia asked me and Felicia. Felicia shrugged. I wasn't even sure what drawers they were referring to, or whether I wanted to know, quite frankly. I just wanted to get the show on the road.

There was a fight in the middle of K-mart, as predicted. Amelia wanted to get a new shower-curtain and they couldn't agree on a pattern. I hoped neither Rubio nor Parker had strong opinions on the shower-curtain.

It took almost an hour to get everything we needed, and that included a good ten minutes arguing over what cheap dinner-set to buy. They weren't even arguing over colour, both sets were white, but Felicia favoured mugs and Amelia wanted tea-cups and trying to find a compromise was beyond my skills.

I wished Eric had come, but before we left he'd stomped off to his office. I was a little annoyed at that. He'd spent all that time telling me I'd just have to learn to lump it because it was Amelia's time to go and now he'd decided just to bury his head in the sand.

Fine. If he was going to be grumpy, I was just going to be grumpy back.

In the meantime, I took Amelia and Felicia to the supermarket and it was just like old times as they were both bored by the time we'd made it as far as the fruit and vegetables. I wondered, briefly, if offering them a lollipop each if they behaved until we got to the checkout was going to work.

But we managed. And with our new items, and our cleaning supplies I followed Felicia's directions to the house.

I parked on the road out the front. It looked like so many other houses around here, brick and tile, built in the 1950's probably, a wonky wooden garage attached to the side and steps leading up to the glass-panelled front door.

"OK" I said. "Let's go and get this place organised."

"Isn't it time for morning tea or something?" Felicia grumbled.

"It's like we brought Dad" Amelia commented.

Amelia was in her element organising the cleaning. For some reason she really enjoyed it. Parker, who was there to let us in the place and trying to move his own belongings in, didn't really know what had hit him when Amelia unpacked the cheap vacuum cleaner we'd bought at K-mart and put it in his hand. He didn't argue though, I noticed that often people didn't, with Amelia. It seemed to only be Felicia who was immune to her persuasiveness.

Felicia made a start in the kitchen and Amelia and I tackled the bathroom, and then Amelia went into the kitchen to point out to Felicia that cleaning it included cleaning the insides of the cupboards, and then Parker and I watched them as they spent about ten minutes debating whether or not it was really a good idea to go poking around in the old wooden cabinets which must have been the original ones built with the house.

When Amelia finally won that argument we all wished she hadn't when we had to spend time examining the little black lumps we found in the corner of one to determine if they were mouse droppings.

"Could be" I said.

"But there's no food" Felicia pointed out. "What would it be eating?"

I looked further into the cupboard and found the answer. There at the back was an old, white candle. A half-chewed candle.

"Mice eat candles?" Amelia asked. I nodded. "Well, that sucks" Felicia said, standing with her hands on her hips.

Parker, I noticed, looked a bit pale. "Mice gross me out" he said.

"Really?" Amelia asked him. "They're OK. It's not so great when Stan eats half of them though, and leaves the bodies lying around. I had that one in my shoe the other week, but it was whole. I think that was Bella…" Parker left the room. Amelia shrugged. "Oh well, I guess she'll have to catch this one for us."

"You're bringing Bella?" I asked. Amelia nodded.

"Oh." That made me sad. Was I supposed to care as much about the cat going as I was my daughters?

"I'm not bringing Eddie here" Felicia said. Yeah, she wasn't all that fond of him. She wasn't all that interested in any pets, really. In the end her rabbit, Bobby, had been re-homed with Hunter's son Ryder, after she'd lost interest and we'd been told he'd talked so much about the bunny he'd seen at our house. Hopefully it had taken his mind off the fact he then got a baby sister called Zoe.

"No. Well he'd probably get confused" Amelia said. That was true. He struggled with the cat-door sometimes and it wasn't like we'd just installed it.

We finished cleaning the kitchen and Rubio arrived, with a van full of his belongings, so we helped him move them in, and then we drove back to our place to load up the van and the girls' cars with their belongings.

It was starting to feel very real that they were going. I'd seen the house and it wasn't just an abstract idea now. I felt sad, but it was an OK sad, if there's such a thing. It felt like something you had to go through, like the pain of childbirth or getting your first period. It felt like a life-change that I couldn't get out of, and one which I'd live through no matter how much it sucked at the time.

It might have helped to have company though. But Eric was resolute in his desire to keep far away from all the activity. He did appear in the hallway, probably on his way to get another coffee refill, just in time to see Rubio and Felicia carrying her chest of drawers towards the front door. "Really, Leesh. You're taking everything that isn't fucking bolted down?" he asked, and poor Rubio looked terrified. I was really worried that he was going to drop his end of the drawers on his toes, but he managed to hang on.

"Yeah. They're my drawers. Go, Rubio. Watch the step, though" Felicia said, totally unconcerned about Eric's grumpiness.

Unfortunately, I was concerned. Because I was the one getting left with it. Shame they didn't have another spare room going.

I prised Eric out of his office long enough to drive to the new place with the rest of us. It was kind of a convoy, Rubio driving the van, Felicia and Amelia following him in their cars, and then Eric, Pam and me in Eric's car. Tray had opted to stay home and 'chill', and Sam had gone off to his first evening's work at Burger Wisconsin. Pam, though, was very interested in the flat her sisters were moving to. "Do you think they'll let me come and stay the night?" she asked.

"Probably" I told her. Eventually Amelia's manicure was going to need to be re-done, after all.

"No" Eric said, at almost the same time as I'd spoken. "You're too young."

"But I have sleep-overs all the time!" Pam said. "Well…sometimes" she amended. Yeah, they had dropped off in the last year or so. Pam seemed to be getting left behind by her peers and I was worried about her too.

"Not unsupervised ones" Eric said, as he waited at an intersection. The rest of the party had made it through the lights. "That light was orange when they went through" Eric said to me, as though I'd been driving one of the other vehicles.

"But…Amelia gets to watch us all the time. And Felicia looks after those other kids. Why can't I go there?"

"Not the same thing" Eric said, although I wasn't sure how it was different.

We spent the rest of the afternoon moving the girls in. Eric, who'd missed a lot of the packing up at the other end, was surprised to see Amelia's bed emerging from the truck. Yeah, well. He should have been helping instead of hiding away.

Mind you it was the double bed already set up in what was going to be Rubio and Felicia's room that really seemed to trouble him. "I didn't think they'd be…um…" he said to me.

"Well, they're flatting together, and they're a couple" I said.

"Mmm" Eric said. He just stood there. He probably needed something to do. That was helping me. "Go and hang these" I said to him.

"Two shower-curtains?" he asked. "But the bathroom is pretty tiny."

"Yeah, but the personalities aren't. And if I ever wanted to get out of K-mart then it was pretty clear we needed a solution."

"OK" Eric said, shrugging, and he walked off to the bathroom. He was back within ten seconds. "The shower's shitty" he said to me in a whisper.

"Yep" I agreed.

"And it's going to be cold in the winter."

"I know."

"The whole place is pretty shitty" Eric said. "I don't think new shower-curtains are really going to fix that."

"No. But I don't think it'll send them home in a hurry, either."

Eric sighed, and went back to his task.

When it was time to say goodbye it felt intensely weird to be leaving my big, grown-up daughters to their own devices in their own flat. Very weird. We hugged, we kissed. Pam hugged them and excitedly tried to get them to give a definite date about when she could stay.

Eric hugged them both, and I'm pretty sure Felicia wiped her eyes. "Just be careful" he said. "Lock the doors. Check the windows. Don't let anyone in if you don't know them." He gave Rubio, who was hovering in the background a particularly hard stare. Rubio scuttled off.

"Yeah, right!" Felicia scoffed. "Like anyone just lets people in their place, how dumb do you think I am?"

"OK. Yes. Quite right, Leesh. OK, well. We'll go now" Eric said. And then we stood there, on the front door steps for a bit longer.

"I'm going to go and put my stuff in the bathroom. Now it's passably clean, at least" Amelia said, and she walked back into the house.

"Yeah. I need to um, OK. See you soon!" Felicia said, and she started closing the door. For a minute I thought Eric might try to stop her, but he didn't. He just watched it close.

"Is it dinner-time?" Pam asked, as she and I walked to Eric's car. Eric hesitated on the steps behind us.

"Just about" I said. "If we don't get home soon, Tray might eat everything in the fridge."

"He's probably already done that" Pam said. "I hope he hasn't eaten the fruit."

"No" I agreed. "But we'll bake the cake tomorrow and that'll foil him."

We reached the car and I turned around. Eric was still only half-way down the steps. "Come on" I called out to him. "You've got the keys. We can't get in."

Eric slowly trudged over and pressed the button to open the car so Pam and I could climb in. And then we drove home. I reached over and put my hand on Eric's leg, but he didn't turn to look at me. He just kept looking straight ahead.

And it wasn't until much later on, when we were having coffee that Eric even acknowledged Amelia and Felicia had gone. "It's quiet" he said. "Without them."

I shrugged. "Usually they're out on a Saturday night anyway."

"Yeah, but I know they're coming home. And I'm listening for it. Now I have nothing to listen for." He sighed heavily and stood up to put his cup in the dishwasher.

"Do you think they're OK?" he asked me.

"Yeah" I said, fanning myself with a magazine that was lying on the table. That cup of coffee had made me feel flushed and hot. "I think they're just fine. I mean, I taught them all I know…so, you know."

"Sookie, you are the person who lets strange men into the house."

"OK, maybe I taught them not to do what I've done. I hope so, anyway."

"I still don't like Rubio" Eric grumbled.

"I don't think you have a choice about that one, mate."

"I just…" Eric trailed off and seemed lost in thought.

"Yep" I agreed. "It doesn't seem that long ago that they were little, does it?"

"No" Eric said. "No, it's just yesterday really."

"Not to them though. I think that's the difference. It's all relative. Remember Felicia at two? And we'd tell Amelia to cut her some slack because she was just little and this voice would shout "I's not lickle! I's a big girl!" as though we were insulting her? It's kind of like that."

Eric looked at me sharply. "You're taking this very well" he said. "Apart from the annoying fanning."

"Hot!" I complained. "But I just…I don't know. I do feel calm about it all…in a way. I feel ready to move on."

Perhaps stupidly, I had thought that Eric would be pleased to hear me say that. I'd thought that was what he'd been trying to tell me for months, every time he brought up the fact that Amelia should be making plans to move out.

But instead he looked at me like I was a traitor. "I don't know if that's right" he said, and then he walked out of the kitchen.

**Thanks for reading!**


	61. Bonus 1: All Change

**A/N - And I'm back! A big thank-you to everyone who is still reading, and reviewing, this as it meanders along through their lives. It's nice to know I'm not alone. I would have liked to have been more alone in bed the other night, though. I got sick of sharing my pillow with my female cat and I kicked her off. Woke up to find her back on the pillow, and a dead mouse in my slipper. I think it was a warning. Next time it'll be me she picks off!**

**Disclaimer: Yeah, nah. Not mine, eh bro?**

EPOV

I had really thought that Sookie and I could commiserate together when the girls left. After all, Sookie had been miserable for a while now at the mere thought that it was maybe, possibly, almost certainly, time for Amelia to move out.

But when it actually came down to it, when Amelia and Felicia were finally leaving here for good, then all she did was worry about fucking shower curtains and whether she should have brought the mousetraps from our house.

I couldn't understand why she wasn't worried about the actual children we were losing. Well, I thought we were losing them. They moved out, they shut the door on me, which was fucking rude. They just didn't want me around anymore.

That really sucked.

But all Sookie wanted to do was moan about how hot it was. It wasn't that far into summer, so it wasn't that hot yet. And she was grumpy, but only with me. Tray got away with dumping with a big pile of his shit all over the floor of Felicia's old room and declaring it his. Sookie even coped with the fact he'd left a trail of socks and underwear all down the hallway on the way there.

Sam didn't cope so well with it. Sam came home from his first night at work and took offence to the fact that the moving had occurred without him and he promptly laid claim to Amelia's room by dragging his mattress in there and putting it on the floor. But, somehow, even when Sookie was delivering the lecture about how she wasn't cleaning up three rooms full of all their shit and they'd better sort it all out quickly, they didn't seem to be getting as much grumpy-Sookie as I was getting for just watching them do it. I was the recipient of all the dirty looks and sighs and eye-rolling. Sam got off pretty much scot-free.

In the end Sam cracked and dragged the mattress back again, but not before he'd made a trip into Felicia's room, or Tray's room it maybe was now, to reclaim all the things he thought were really his. There was a rather nasty fight over an ugly old sweatshirt that I had to break up when it threatened to get out of hand. That wasn't something I exactly relished these days. They were fucking big and annoying and hard to handle, and they didn't always sit down and shut up and listen to me when I wanted them to.

But at least they were still here. And so was Pam. "Can I pick a room?" she asked me, as we stood there and watched Tray and Sam run back and forth down the hall grabbing anything they thought they could get away with taking from the other. 15 years of sharing a room seemed to have created a lot of shared belongings, and some of them I didn't even want to think about. "Really, Tray? You're stealing underpants?"

"These are the good ones" he said, as he ran back down the hallway.

"Can I Daddy?" Pam asked again.

"No, your room is fine" I said to her.

"But it's at the front. I don't want to be at the front. I want to be at the back of the house."

"The house isn't that big, Pam."

"But I've never been at the back! And I like purple."

"You want Amelia's room?"

"Yes!" Pam said adamantly.

"I get Amelia's room before she does" Sam grumbled as he walked back from the bathroom.

"You've got a room" I said to him, as he went in there, paused and then said "Fucking Tray!" and went down the hallway again.

"What's happening now?" Sookie asked. She sounded grumpy. She was probably grumpy with me again. Grumpy that I wasn't on-board with the whole 'let's celebrate the big kids leaving' plan.

"I think…it might be underpants?" I said to her.

"It is" Pam confirmed. "Tray took the good ones."

Sam came down the hallway carrying a whole drawer. "I need that you cock!" Tray yelled after him.

"You can't take just one drawer, Tray! And not a drawer that isn't yours anyway."

"OK, well this is going to have to wait until morning" Sookie said, not making eye-contact with me.

"Yep, everyone shut up and go to bed" I said to them.

"Daddy said I can have Amelia's room" Pam said to Sookie.

"Did he?" Sookie said, kind of distantly. "That's nice." Whatever it was, what I got from her tone was that it wasn't nice. She still thought I'd done something wrong, but I wasn't sure how much that was to do with Pam getting Amelia's room, or the fact that I wasn't celebrating the fact that Amelia was no longer in Amelia's room.

I just didn't get why she didn't see this was…sad.

"So how was work?" Sookie said to Sam, as he came back out.

He shrugged. "OK. It's hot, standing there, cooking. But it was alright."

"Yeah" Sookie said. 'I know." And then she turned and walked back down the hallway.

"Can I have a pink wall too?" Pam asked.

"The hair is enough for now, Pam" I told her. I didn't like that pink stripe in her hair. But at least she hadn't moved out of home.

SPOV

I didn't know what I could do for Eric. He looked sad, and I knew I should probably be comforting him, but there wasn't really much I could do to make it better. I wasn't Amelia or Felicia and I couldn't make them come home. And there was a tiny part of me that was just grumpy with him anyway. Grumpy that he'd spent so long telling me to just get over it and now he seemed unable to do the same. And even all the to-ing and fro-ing with Tray and Sam and Pam trying to get hold of the best rooms didn't take his mind off it.

Not even when we got up on Sunday morning and found everyone was moving. I hadn't bothered sleeping in with Eric, he hadn't woken up anyway. But I had taken a long, hot shower in the hope it would make me feel better. I felt OK for about five minutes, and then I felt hot again. Stupid weather.

I hadn't expected to find quite so much furniture in the hall though. "So, what's happening?" I asked Pam.

"Well, Tray's got Felicia's room, I'm having Amelia's room, because Daddy said, and Sam's going to have my room because he does want to be at the front of the house. Weird."

"Look what I found!" Tray said, thrusting something plastic in my face. Oh, Lego. "Where was that?"

"In the corner, under the bed…with, uh, some other things. I'd forgotten I'd built this one. Hey, Dad! Look at this!" It occurred to me to wonder just how many other treasures I might unearth in the boys room now that it was being stripped and emptied. Oh, fantastic. I hoped there was nothing too smelly, or decomposed, or…just plain gross.

Right. I'd better get to it then, I decided.

So I had a second day of cleaning and organising and shifting furniture. Eric emerged after Tray burst in to our room to show him the lost treasure from under the bed, and then he managed to at least make himself useful by helping move some of the bigger pieces of furniture, although he wanted to argue the point about some of it.

We didn't really talk to each other much, which was OK because the three kids were all talking to us and to each other, sometimes quite loudly. It was kind of nice to be busy, and I wanted to say that to Eric but, well, I was grumpy with him. On principle. So I decided not to.

EPOV

I had really thought I would miss Amelia and Felicia when I got up on Sunday morning, and, waking up to find myself alone in bed had really set the tone for the day, I figured. But somehow with the confusion caused by all three kids deciding they desperately needed to switch bedrooms right that minute it was hard to notice that there'd ever been another two kids here in the first place.

Belongings were strewn from one end of the house to other, and Tray seemed determined to just sit on the floor and play with his old Lego, while everyone just stepped around him.

"But I want to paint it" Sam said to me, as we pushed his bureau into Pam's old room. "Because I hate this weird blue colour."

"It's OK" I said. As long as I didn't have to articulate what the shade was called, it seemed fine.

"I want something nicer" he said.

"So buy yourself some paint" I told him. 'You've got a job now."

"Really?" Sam asked.

"I don't want to paint the room. I think it looks nice."

Sam sighed. "No wonder they moved out" he muttered. Maybe he was right. I wondered how their decorating was going. I wondered if they'd even started.

Ivan came in and snuffled around, checking out the new smells. "Maybe" I said. "Maybe we could get you some paint. After Christmas."

"OK" Sam said, smiling.

"We're buying paint?" Tray asked, sticking his head in the door. "I want, um…brown."

"No brown!" Sookie's voice yelled out.

Tray pulled a face. "Well, that green then, the army one…"

"Is green allowed?" I yelled out to Sookie.

"Not khaki" she yelled back.

Tray pulled another face, and left. After a moment Pam shrieked. "Ow! What was that? Tray! TRAY! That hurt, Tray!"

Tray came running into Sam's room and tried to wedge himself into a corner. "Did you locate the rubber-band gun by any chance?" I asked him, and he held it up, before holding his fingers to his lips.

"Look what Tray did!" Pam said, as she walked into the room. She pointed to a red mark on her leg.

Tray gave himself away by giggling, and Pam scowled at him. "That hurt!" she yelled.

"That's the point!" Tray said. "I might rig it to shoot anyone who comes into my room."

Pam stormed off. "No, you won't Tray" I said to him. Fuck. I hoped he wouldn't. You couldn't really tell with Tray.

"Where's your iPod, Tray? Do you know?" Pam yelled from the hallway.

"Fuck!" Tray said, and he took off after Pam.

I was starting to wonder how we'd ever coped with five kids. They were all so fucking loud. And slightly obnoxious.

Maybe it wasn't going to be so bad after all.

"So, you're going to paint the other wall pink in my room, aren't you Daddy?" Pam asked me from the doorway.

"Um…I think Sam is. To pay for the paint for his room."

"How the fuck does that work?" Sam asked, from where he was putting stuff in the closet.

"Well, it's a fairly straight-forward system of mutually beneficial exchanges, based on the concept of us all living together in relative harmony and recognition of the fact that…"

Sam cut me off. "Jesus Christ" he said. "Whatever happened to 'because I say so'?"

"Yep. That too" I said, and I went to make myself some coffee.

I'd just poured a cup when Amelia walked in. "Oh, thank God!" she said, helping herself to a cup and pouring coffee into it.

She had moved out, hadn't she?

"There's no coffee!" she told me. "Well, there's coffee, but not nice stuff. Hopeless! I don't want to drink instant. I mean, I was up all freaking night because Felicia is so loud! Oh my God, it's like….ugh. I knew I should have taken that other room, but Parker took that, little dweeb. You know he's scared of mice? He had a panic attack in the kitchen this morning and I spent, like, a good twenty minutes talking him down off the ledge. It's just a mouse! Jeez. He should live here for a while."

And, while I was still stuck on the part about Felicia being loud and trying to stop my brain from going down the route of putting together just what she was doing when she was being loud, Amelia walked out of the kitchen yelling "Mum! Hey, Mum! Where are those mousetraps you said you had? And the cat cage? I want to take Bella today."

Amelia was still there an hour later, talking to Sookie and Pam in the kitchen as they baked. "She's so loud!" Amelia said again. "She doesn't know either, because I told her this morning and she got all shitty with me. But if that doesn't scare the mice away, I don't know what will. She's my little sister. I mean, ugh!"

I left the kitchen again because I did not need to hear anything else about how loud Felicia was. And then, to prove Amelia's point, I heard Felicia roar "Who the FUCK said you could have that?"

I couldn't have heard her from Royal Oak, could I?

No, I hadn't. She was in her room, well, Tray's room, standing over him trying to beat him with a tennis racquet.

"You didn't take it!" Tray said.

"Yet! I didn't take it yet! I didn't know you were going to move in as soon as I left. Jesus fucking Christ, Tray. You little scab! You think if it's not nailed down, it's yours, don't you?"

"Who are you calling little?" Tray asked.

"Put me down!" Felicia screeched. Tray attempted to put Felicia over his shoulder. She didn't make it easy for him, and tried using the racquet to poke him in the back of the knee and bring him down.

"Tray, put Felicia down" I said. Felicia really didn't like the fact that Tray and Sam were so big now, any more than I did. I wasn't quite sure when they'd gotten quite so large, but I wasn't prepared for it. It was like buying a tiny puppy and not being sure of the breed, and waking up one morning to discover you now lived with a Great Dane/St. Bernard cross or something. I tried saying that to Sookie once, but all that happened was she looked me up and down and muttered something about how she knew what breed she was getting.

"He hadn't even picked me up!" Felicia said, as she got both feet back on the ground. "Not really. He can't anyway."

Tray looked like he was about to have another attempt at proving her wrong, but I gave him a warning look and he stepped away, as Felicia tried to jab him with the tennis racquet again.

"Alright! Knock it off you two."

"He started it" Felicia complained. "He was stealing my stuff!"

"You left it! It was in my room!" Tray countered.

"Twenty-four hours ago it was my room, moron!"

Oh yeah. Felicia had moved out. So why was I here breaking her and Tray apart? Again?

"I thought you moved out" I asked Felicia. She shrugged. "I needed some of my stuff. Plus, Rubio had to go to church with his mum. She rang up and made him. That's OK, though. He only wanted to play PlayStation with stupid Parker anyway. Hey, can you help me fill out my tax-forms for this new job? I have to use a secondary income tax code, but it's going to be my main income for a while, so I don't know if that's right." Felicia frowned.

"Have you looked on the website?" I asked her.

"Yeah! But I don't get it. I had about ten thousand windows open and all I managed to do was register myself so I can do my tax online, but not until I also do some voice-activated thing. I don't get it at all. Stupid Inland Revenue Department. I hate them. Everything they touch is so fucked! It took ages to get my refund last year."

"OK" I said to Felicia. "Let's go and look it up together."

"I'm taking the racquet" she informed me, as we started walking down the hall to the office. "In case Tray thinks he can get his grubby mitts on it."

"Yep, whatever Leesh. That's fine."

"Don't let me forget to ask Mum for a bowl, too."

"What do you need a bowl for?"

"Drip in the bathroom."

"Wouldn't a bucket be better?"

"Um…probably. I'll ask Mum."

"Pam! Do you want to keep this poster?" Sam yelled from his new room.

"Is it Tinkerbell?" Pam yelled back.

"Yes!"

"No!"

"What am I meant to do with it?"

"Give it to Tray!" Pam yelled back.

"I don't fucking want a fairy poster!" Tray yelled at the pair of them, from the other end of the house.

Some things just never changed.

SPOV

Sunday flew by in a flash. Between moving the youngest three kids around in the morning, and then dealing with Amelia and Felicia, who both wanted to borrow things, take extra stuff and complain about each other to me, I was exhausted by the end of it. I'd had to make lunch for seven people, and I was slightly worried the older girls were going to stay for dinner too.

They didn't seem particularly inclined to go home in a hurry.

Eventually they did though. Amelia packed Bella up in one of our cat cages. "Just lock her in the laundry overnight, until she gets used to the place" I said to Amelia. "And remember to put butter on her paws."

"Yeah, yeah" Amelia said, dismissively. "Thanks, cat-whisperer."

"I haven't lost a cat yet!" I reminded her. I hadn't lost a kid either, but I had been tempted to smear Tray's hands in butter on occasions to stop him thinking it was a good idea to wander off.

Eric had spent all the time after lunch telling the girls they needed to go, and they'd completely ignored him. I could see though, that as grumpy as he was acting over the fact they'd returned home, he was kind of pleased.

I just hoped it cheered him up a bit. I was...well, I was OK. I was still a bit grumpy, but I'd live. I was busy, so that took my mind off it.

After dinner, and after Sam had gone off to work again, and Tray was annoying Pam in lieu of having anything better to do, I asked Eric if he felt any better.

"About what?" he asked me. OK, so he was going to play dumb now.

"About them moving out" I said. "You were all grumpy and ready to declare me an enemy of the state last night."

Eric gave me a stare that suggested I'd completely lost my remaining marbles. "I wasn't grumpy" Eric said, grumpily. He looked off into space. "I was…well, I'm a bit worried about them. I'm not sure they realise quite what they're in for."

"No" I agreed. "I don't think they do. I'm a bit worried too. Worried that they'll still be moaning to me about each other for the rest of their lives. I'm actually starting to appreciate what it's like to be Lorena, and, my God, those are words I never thought I'd say."

Eric was still just looking at me. "So…you're worried?"

"Yep."

"You don't seem worried."

"Well…I've been busy too. Sorting them all out. I didn't expect to have to move everyone else, either. Poor Pam, I promised her we'd do something tomorrow as it's the holidays, but at some stage I'm going to have to get into the boys' old room and fumigate it. How much do you reckon one of those protective suits, the ones they have for chemical spills, are?"

Eric was still just looking at me. "So…we're OK? With it?" he asked. He frowned and looked confused in much the same way that Tray did when you told him he couldn't have a sandwich as I was literally putting dinner on plates as I was speaking.

"I think, that we don't have to like it, we just have to accept it. That seems to be the rule."

Eric sighed and sat down next to me at the kitchen table. I'd been trying to go over my list for Christmas. "So…you don't like it?" he asked.

"No, but I'll get used to it. I didn't much like Amelia going to school either, but I wasn't prepared to tell the truancy officers that if they came looking for her."

"I just…"

"You can always go and see them. And they'll be round here, I guess. They don't seem to have forgotten where we live."

"I really thought that, well, you know" Eric said. "That it would stop. Worrying about them. I thought it might be easier when they weren't here. Now I just worry what they're doing that I can't see. It's really fucking annoying."

Mmm. Typical, perhaps, for Eric to make it sound as though it was the girl's fault for moving out in the first place. But I felt for him, I really did.

"It'll be OK" I said.

"I don't have to like Rubio, do I?" Eric asked. "That's not a rule?"

"No, I think you just have to tolerate him."

"Tolerate seems like a…very, uh, _strong_ word, Sookie. Can I just promise not to tell him he's a fucking idiot?"

"I think that's probably a good idea if you don't want Felicia to turn on you."

Eric grumbled at that, and then he left to go and pick Sam up from work, like he'd said he would. Sam had volunteered to walk but I think Eric was feeling a bit over-protective. I picked up my list and fanned myself with it.

Pam walked in, sighed, and sat down at the table with me. "It's not that hot" she grumbled.

"I've been doing stuff" I said in my defence. "You alright?"

"Bored. It's no fun without Amelia" she complained. Amelia wasn't all that interested in Pam these days, so I didn't think that was the whole problem.

"What's everyone else doing?" I asked.

"Oh. Well, it's just Tray. He's sitting in his room. Farting. He says it better when people don't yell at him for doing it. He's…really gross actually."

"Most brothers are" I commiserated. "But I actually meant the girls from school."

"Oh, them. Dunno" Pam said. "Shopping, I guess. And stuff."

"You should call someone. I could take you into town or something. I've got to buy Dad a present anyway. I don't know what to get him, and I don't think giving him a key to Amelia and Felicia's flat, which is what I think he really wants, is going to cut it."

Pam just frowned at the table. "They're boring" she said.

"Who? The other girls?"

"Yeah. They just…I dunno. They want to follow boys around, and text boys and they don't do anything else. It's _really_ stupid. And boring."

It was. I could sympathise. "I know" I said. "But you're all growing up, and they're…um, discovering the appeal of boys."

"Bleurgh!" Pam said, sticking her finger down her throat.

"Maybe they like boys who are more, um…well. Not like Tray, anyway."

"Yeah, maybe. But I don't think so. Boys are pretty gross."

"Well, they get better" I said to her. Poor Pam. The hormones had yet to hit her in full force, she just didn't seem that enthused about the favourite past-times of her peers.

"Was Daddy gross when you got him?" Pam asked.

"Not overly so." He had his moments.

"So…they get better when they're really old?"

"He wasn't really old when I got him" I said to her. He was really young. He still seemed kind of young to me, even at 46. I hadn't been that age since Pam was a little girl in pleated skirts and knee-socks, after all.

"Yeah. He was old" Pam informed me. God knows what that made me. Although I certainly felt old now.

"Well, anyway. You have ages yet to worry about boys, and how gross they are. And Daddy would be happy if you never did, I think."

"He doesn't like Rubio."

"No, but Felicia does. So he has to lump it."

Pam was quiet for a moment. "How do you know, you know? When you like someone?"

"Oh. Um. Well, you just do. You, want to, uh…" God, I would have thought I'd be better at this by the last daughter. It was still really hard to explain. "You want to hang out with them, and find out what they think about stuff, and, um…oh! Yeah. Remember it should be fun. Don't bother with anyone who makes you miserable. And don't look for the perfect person, look who's perfect for you, and, um...oh..."

"And you think they're pretty?" Pam asked me.

"Well, I guess. But I'm not sure pretty's the right word. Dad gets a bit funny when I say that, but I think that's because he heard me telling Eddie he was a pretty boy. No, handsome is probably a better word."

"Oh" Pam said. She stared at her hands. "Maybe I could call the twins?"

"Well, it's probably better than sitting around here while I clean Sam and Tray's old room."

"Yeah, euw. Did you see the old socks they had at the bottom of the wardrobe? Some of them were all crunchy."

"Yeah" I said. "I did."

Pam walked off, and then Sam and Eric arrived home. "Good night at work?" I asked Sam.

"Yep" he said. "I'm getting faster."

"Well that's good. So, the people there are nice?" I asked.

Sam gave me a weird look. "Um. I guess so. I'm going to take a shower. I smell all greasy." He walked out of the kitchen and I heard Tray accost him in the hall. "So did you bring any free stuff home?" Poor Tray, he didn't really understand how Sam could spend all night cooking burgers and chips and then not want to bring more of the same for us all to share. Or even just for Tray himself.

"There's a lot of girls working there" Eric commented, as he left the kitchen. There wasn't much I could say to that.

Amelia and Felicia might have left, but they weren't forgotten. And they kept turning up. On Monday I got to the gym to find Felicia deep in conversation with Quinn, who she'd always had a soft-spot for. Or possibly a crush on. It was hard to tell sometimes, with Felicia.

"Oh! You're here, thank God!" Felicia said, when I went over to them.

It was nice to feel wanted, but then she launched into a discussion about how much time Amelia spent in the bathroom, and how she did it before work, and then again in the evening if she was going out for work.

"She's so annoying!" Felicia said. "How do I make her stop?"

"Dunno" I said, and I walked over to a treadmill to start warming up.

"But…you have to know!" Felicia said.

"Well, it wasn't any different at home" I pointed out.

Felicia threw her hands up in the air and stalked off. I had to admit, that actually felt quite good. Maybe there would be an up-side to them moving out? I'd already had a call from Amelia earlier that day fretting about Bella being locked in the laundry and asking me if she'd be OK, and I'd been able to say she would be, without having to confront changing the litter-tray myself, even though I could tell Amelia really wanted me to go around there and check on her. Hands-off was great.

Tuesday Amelia called me to update me on the mouse-hunt, and tell me what a wuss Parker was, and then later on Felicia called me to ask if I thought it was OK if she banned Rubio from the bedroom when she wanted some alone time. I was really keeping out of that one.

And then at dinnertime on Tuesday I had one final call asking me to settle a fight because Amelia was making macaroni cheese and Felicia thought she didn't have to add vegetables and she wanted to because "…that's the way you've always made it, isn't it Mum?"

"Uh-huh" I said. "But I'm not cooking your dinner tonight, so it's up to you guys."

"Oh, for Pete's sake" Amelia muttered, and then she hung up.

I was feeling pretty good about my ability to cope with it, really. Especially as I still felt, well…a little grumpy. Only I wasn't sure who I was grumpy with. Sure, it hadn't been much fun to clean the leftover detritus in the boys' old room, and the prospect of there being two rooms that practically required me to don a Hazmet suit when I went in them every week didn't really appeal, but that wasn't it.

And I wasn't grumpy at Eric. Not really. Only sometimes, but no more than usual. Pam was OK, just still a bit mopey. We did some shopping for Christmas and I got really grumpy half-way round St Luke's, but that was to be expected. And they needed to get their air-con working better if all that sun was going to pour in the skylights, that was for certain.

I was grumpy at Eddie when he slept on my clean towels, and grumpy at Stan when the four skink corpses were discovered in the corner of the living room. I was grumpy at Ivan for nearly tripping me up at dinner-time. But that was all normal, run of the mill stuff that had happened a hundred times before.

This was a different kind of grumpiness. And it was more than grumpiness, it was something else. Even when I wasn't specifically grumpy with Eric, I was kind of, well, off him. It was hard to articulate…maybe it wasn't. Maybe I didn't want to articulate it.

Maybe I'd been using worrying about Amelia leaving as an excuse for a while now. And now it had happened, I had to think of something else.

"I could read you the porny bits?" Eric offered, when I was reading in bed on Wednesday night. I sighed, and I put my book on my bedside table and turned off the light.

"It's OK" I said. It wasn't a book that was doing anything for me anyway.

Eric sighed. "I'm a bit tired" I said. "What with all the moves, and then stuff for Christmas. I've been flat-out."

"Uh-huh" Eric said. I lay there and wished to be cooler so I could get some sleep. It was hopeless a lot of the time at the moment. My mind raced, my face burned, my skin itched. I might have been coping with having some of the kids move out, but something else was going on.

Something I didn't even want to think about. Certainly not at 3am when I sometimes woke up and fretted.

If I wished it away, that would work, wouldn't it? If I wished it away and pretended I wasn't this old and this useless and miserable and mopey and all the things I didn't want to be. All the things that I, especially, didn't want Eric to think I was.

It was just too depressing. I gave up that line of thinking. I just hoped to God that Eric wouldn't wander off anywhere else now. After all, it kind of felt like he'd have a right to. I wasn't any fun, and I wasn't sure I'd ever be fun to be around again.

Maybe I should lock him in the laundry? With butter on his hands?

Maybe I'd just have to deal with this the way I'd dealt with the girls moving out. Realise I couldn't change it, couldn't turn back time, that this was a life-change I couldn't skip over, either. One day at a time, and all of that.

But after Christmas. I was going to worry about it after Christmas.

**Thanks for reading!**


	62. Bonus 1: Random cats of kindness

**A/N Aargh! Everything conspired against me this week. Too many sick kids, and not enough husbands who weren't working every night. Never mind. I have writted this for you, as my five yr old would say. She likes to murder the English language. You're just lucky she didn't writ this for you given her fluidity of spelling. So instead of 'I like the swimming pool' you get 'I luk the swmmn pul'. Or maybe that's just a phonetic representation of a Kiwi accent :)**

**Disclaimer: Nut myn**

SPOV

Eric was wary around me now and I felt bad about that. It was a vicious cycle; he was grumpy with me because I was grumpy with him, and I was grumpy with him because…well, I just was.

Maybe he'd have to live with it? That wouldn't kill him would it? He could surely put up with another twenty or thirty years of me telling him he took up too much space in bed, needed to bring cups back to the kitchen occasionally and that the razor was a modern invention he could really do with acquainting himself with from time to time.

I thought it all sounded fairly reasonable. Or not.

And then I got really sad that I was so grumpy and I had a little cry in the laundry on Wednesday morning. Unfortunately Eric walked in, probably looking for where he had put that last cup he'd been wandering around with and I was torn between being sad and being grumpy with Eric for just…well standing there. He was terrible at just lurking. Why was he always lurking? I was here first.

"What?" I asked Eric.

"Nothing." I sounded a lot like the kids when I said that, but I didn't care.

Eric frowned and looked like he wanted to say something, and then he obviously thought better of it because he just hugged me. Well, that was worse. Now I was sobbing. Stupid Eric and his stupid hugs.

At what point, I wondered, would I be declared insane and committed?

"It's OK" Eric said, when it quite obviously bloody wasn't, because it was eight-thirty in the morning and I was standing in the laundry crying.

"I need to blow my nose" I said into Eric's chest. I didn't really want to wipe my nose all over his shirt. I'd end up washing it, after all.

Eric released me and I walked into the kitchen to grab a tissue from the box on the bench. Tray and Sam were in there sitting at the table and arguing over who ate all the Weetbix. It didn't really matter who'd eaten it now, we'd just have to buy more.

"I'll go to the supermarket later on" I said, as I blew my nose.

"Can you get more biscuits?" Tray asked.

"Possibly."

"Can we get some Coke?" Tray asked again. I nodded. Eric walked in. "Just, leave your mother alone" he said to the boys, which was a bit mean. It wasn't their fault I felt like this. I still wasn't sure whose fault it actually was, but I knew it wasn't down to them.

Tray sighed, and looked grumpy but didn't say anything else. I walked off to see what dirty laundry I could round up. I didn't want to talk to anyone, especially not Eric. I didn't know what he thought was wrong with me, and I didn't want to know. I didn't know what was going to make it stop either.

Eric could stop it just by walking away and leaving me to it. Lucky old Eric.

Eventually he went to work and I was home with the kids again. Pam and I did some groceries which was a bit weird when I realised when didn't have to take Amelia and Felicia's preferences into consideration when we were deciding what biscuits to buy or what dinners were going to be on the menu.

"I miss them" Pam sighed. "Now I only have Sam and Tray to hang out with. They suck."

Poor Pam. School holidays were no fun sometimes. "You're staying with the twins on Friday night though." Venetia and Florentine were still kicking around and Pam had managed to track them down.

"Yeah" she said, not sounding very enthused.

"They have a pool" I pointed out.

"It's hopeless when I have to smother myself in sunblock" Pam grumbled. "I hate the sun."

"The pool has lights. Maybe you could swim at night?"

"Maybe" Pam said, but she didn't sound very thrilled at that idea.

I had a fun afternoon putting away the groceries and doing some ironing. It was all go in my life. No wonder I felt a little down. I realised that I'd have to make an effort to cheer myself up or else Eric would get really fed up with me.

Although being hot from the ironing didn't make me feel any better.

And, as it turned out, Eric had found a new home anyway. "Dad's here" Amelia said, when I answered the phone. "He just turned up."

"Yeah. He does that."

"I've only just got home from work, and I have to go back as there's a thing I have to be at. I don't have time to sit here and keep Dad company!"

"Where's Felicia?"

"Making him coffee. We only have a coffee-plunger. Dad's pulling that face he does when it looks like he thinks you're trying to poison him, but he'll humour you by taking your paltry offerings." Wow. Amelia had lived with Eric for most of her life, hadn't she? And then I heard the muffled sounds of Felicia in the background talking to Amelia. "No!" Amelia said. "I don't think we do have any biscuits. They all got eaten. He'll have to have...I don't know. Aren't there some muesli bars?"

I didn't hear Felicia's answer to that. Amelia spoke into the phone again. "Mum? Mum, why is he here?"

"Well, visiting. What did he say when he arrived?"

"That our door doesn't look very secure. I think he's checking up on us." I knew he was. Poor Eric. He didn't like things he couldn't control. And I guessed I knew that because I'd lived with Eric for a long time too, now.

I worried that maybe I fell into that category. After all, my moods were up and down and all over the place. I didn't know where half of them arrived from, let alone had any control over them, so Eric was bound to be bewildered. And frustrated. Well, that made two of us.

I hoped he liked living with the girls.

"I think it's a bit on the nose" Amelia continued. "We've only been gone a few days, after all."

"It's nice he cares."

"There's caring and then…" I could hear Felicia again the background. "No!" Amelia said. "Don't give it to him. No, Leesh! Oh!"

"What's happening?"

"She's giving Dad the spare key!" Amelia complained in the voice that all the kids used to tell on one of their siblings. Usually the complaints were more about stolen items of clothing and hogging of the remote control, not giving their dad a spare key to the place where they lived now.

Maybe he was moving in with them? I wondered how Parker felt about having to share his room with Eric.

"Um…I guess it's a good idea, maybe? For emergencies?" I tried.

"What emergency? The only emergency we've had so far is the surprise guest who doesn't like our coffee."

"Oh, look. You'll have to talk to him about it. I don't know what he's planning." I very rarely did, after all.

"That's no help" Amelia said, sounding really grumpy. "Do you want to talk to him and tell him he can't take it?"

Well, not really. "It's your key" I said.

"But Leesh already gave it to him! Tell her she doesn't have to do everything he says." Oh God, no. If Felicia ever figured that one out it would break Eric's heart.

"I'm pretty sure he's not going to have his mates over and throw a party while you're out, Amelia."

"Oh. You just don't get it!" Amelia said. I could imagine her throwing up her hands in disgust at my inability to comprehend what it was like when Eric just invaded your space because he felt like it.

Well, I was sympathetic. But there was a limit to my sympathy. "Just go and talk to him about it if you want an answer. I don't know what goes on in Eric's head." I made it a point not to try to figure it out. If I did I'd just spend far too much time wondering what on earth he was cooking up, and not enough time doing the boring stuff like making dinner and washing the floor. You could get permanently side-tracked if you went down that road.

"You're no use!" Amelia said. I didn't correct her. I kind of felt like she might be right. "I'll sort it out then. Bye." And then she hung up.

Eric eventually turned up just in time for dinner. "So did you have a nice visit?" I asked.

"What?"

"With the girls."

"Oh, I thought you meant with Aud. He's acting a bit funny."

Bloody Aud. Trust Eric to focus on a random cat. A random _girl_ cat. "No, I meant with Amelia and Felicia."

"Oh. Well, I just called in."

"Surprise inspection was it?" I asked, as I opened up the cutlery drawer and pulled out knives and forks to use for dinner. And then I put two knives and two forks back. That was kind of sad.

"I don't like the door" Eric said. "All that glass."

"Well, luckily you have a key to it now." Eric didn't say anything to that; he just stood there, watching me for a bit.

"I'm OK" I said.

"Mmm" Eric mused. "I was just thinking…he does have an owner, doesn't he?"

"What? Oh. Probably. Cats usually do. If they don't have one, they find one pretty quickly…" I was going to add 'just like you did', but Eric walked off. Nice.

Hope that whole new home thing worked out for him.

EPOV

Sookie was still upset about…well, something. If it wasn't the girls I didn't have a clue, and I suspected that it was the girls, really. Sookie just didn't like to admit it.

So I went to visit them, just to make sure they really were OK. So I could tell Sookie and she'd feel better about them leaving.

"Oh. It's you" Amelia said, when she opened the door to me. She was holding her hair-straightening thing and I was a bit worried she might use it like a weapon.

"Hello to you too, Amelia." The door looked like it might fall off its hinges if she kept hold of it like that. "You need to get that door looked at. I don't think it will keep anyone out."

"What do you want?" I wondered if Amelia had always been this rude and wary of people trying to come in the door at home, or if she was just protective of this place.

"Is that Dad?" Felicia asked in the background.

"Yes" I called out. I still hadn't made it over the threshold. Felicia came over to join Amelia in blocking the doorway with her body. "Why are you here?" Felicia asked.

"Visiting" I said. I nearly added that it was a free country, but honestly, I couldn't fucking tell half the time. It wasn't like the States and there seemed to be a lot more regulations attached to everything you did. Possibly any minute now I was about to be carried off for breaching some aspect of the Treaty of Waitangi that I had no fucking clue about.

Still, at least around here no one was likely to fire a warning shot as they ran me off the property. I didn't even want to think what New Zealanders allowed to carry guns would be like. It was fucking scary enough that Jason owned one for hunting.

"But you don't visit" Felicia said.

"He does, but only with Mum" Amelia added.

"Because Mum makes him" Felicia replied. "So he wouldn't do this off his own bat. Did Mum send you?"

I tried to work out whether that would make this visit better or worse in their eyes. Eventually, I wanted to get in the door.

"Maybe" I said.

"I guess you can come in then" Felicia said, stepping aside. Amelia moved too, but not before she said "I have to go out so I can't hang around chatting for too long."

The place wasn't any better than I remembered it being. The hall was dark and the wallpaper was a pattern of dull brown and green leaves that was just truly depressing.

I wouldn't want to live here. I couldn't believe Amelia and Felicia did.

I followed Felicia into the living room, with its incredibly ugly stone fireplace into which was set a small, ancient gas heater, and sat on the couch. I didn't know how old the couch was, but there wasn't a lot of give left in the springs. I might as well have just sat on the floor.

"So…um…do you want anything?" Felicia asked.

"Coffee?" I tried. I wasn't sure what my chances were. Felicia disappeared. I looked at the fireplace and tried not see the piles of magazines strewn about the place. Amelia came in, tidied up the piles and muttered a lot about useless 'blokes'. She sounded like Sookie sometimes.

The other kid…the one whose name I couldn't remember stuck his head in the room and then scuttled out again. "It's just my dad!" Felicia yelled in the background, and then she came in carrying one of those weird things that made coffee when you pushed down the plunger.

They made shit coffee.

Felicia put it on the coffee table and she and Amelia looked at each other, before they both left the room. Felicia came back with cups, and disappeared again. I could hear Amelia talking in the background. I wondered who to.

Finally Felicia arrived back with a box. "There's muesli bars" she said.

"I'll pass."

"We ate all the baking Mum gave us. Well, Rubio did. It wasn't meant to be for him though, so I told him not to do it again. Amelia thinks I yell at him too much, but honestly, someone needs too. And he shouldn't eat my food. He asked if I ever bake, but Jesus Christ, he's out of luck if he's waiting for me to make ginger crunch. Why would I when I have Mum?"

OK. Felicia seemed to be in charge of that relationship then. I wasn't sure if that made me happier or not.

The happiest I'd be would be if Rubio decided to go home to his own mother so she could bake for him.

"So, I was thinking" I said to her, as she pushed the plunger down into the coffeepot, "was that your mother and I should have a key to this place…"

"You want a key?' Felicia interrupted as she poured the coffee. She passed me a cup. "There's no milk, Rubio drank that. Wanker."

"Mmm, for, uh…security…" I actually had quite a good reason prepared. A nice, valid reason about making sure they didn't end up dead and buried under the house.

But Felicia had gone, and I could hear her arguing with Amelia in the hall. I sipped my coffee. That was fucking awful stuff.

"Catch!" Felicia yelled, and I had just enough time to catch the key that came flying through the air at me. It might have been easier if I hadn't still been holding a cup with my other hand.

"Not bad for an old bloke" Felicia said, as she sat down on the couch with me and picked up her own cup. I wasn't sure what I objected to more, being described as old or as a bloke.

"I'm not that old" I said.

"Yeah, you are" Felicia said confidently, as I tried to drink some more of the coffee. It was really fucking awful stuff. Almost unpalatable.

"Mum says…" Amelia said, walking into the room. Then she stopped talking and just flopped down. "Never mind" she muttered. "You gave it to him."

"It's the spare spare" Felicia said. "Parker got so many made, it's not funny."

Well, that didn't sound fucking safe. How many people were wandering around with keys to this place? "Get a dead-bolt" I said to them. "And make sure you use it."

"Have you got a second job Mum doesn't know about?" Felicia asked. "Selling home-security systems?"

"Ha fucking ha, Leesh."

"I am just saying that it seems weird you're round here telling us to bolt the bloody door. You're not going to use that key to stage a break-in and then try to sell us an alarm or something, are you? I'm not giving you any of the money I earned. And Tray sitting on the front lawn farting is not a security system anyway."

"Oh God, I don't miss that!" Amelia said.

"Yeah…it's quiet without them around" Felicia said, almost wistfully. "Poor Rubio. I've only got him to put in an arm-lock now."

"Was that the commotion in your room last night?" Amelia asked her.

"Um…maybe?" Felicia said, and she looked down at her cup. Oh, please don't let her say any more. Some things I just didn't need to think about.

And I'd been practicing not thinking about it for a long time now, ever since I'd suspected what Felicia might have done at fourteen. I was getting really good at implementing my 'I'm not asking so don't fucking tell me' policy.

"Well, I've got to get ready" Amelia said. "Phoebe will be miffed if I'm late. Nadia's not there tonight, thank God, so I get a chance to actually do something other than hand out name-tags to people."

"OK. Have fun" I said to her.

"Oh jeez, Dad. It's work, it's not fun!"

"Don't go home with anyone too strange!" Felicia yelled at Amelia, and she turned around to glare at Felicia, before walking out the door. Felicia just giggled to herself. "What?" she asked when she saw me looking at her.

"I don't think I fucking want to know" I said, and she giggled some more.

"So, do we pass muster?" she asked in the end. "Are you going to report back to Mum that the ironing's up to date and the bathroom is clean? I can't vouch for either of those things of course, but if you could stop Mum high-tailing it round here with her rubber-gloves I'd appreciate it. Amelia's bad enough at times. Parker got the bathroom floor soaked and I thought she was going to make him cry the other morning."

"Well, I think your mother has enough on her plate at the moment."

"Yeah. And you better get home for dinner before Tray eats it all" Felicia pointed out. "If Mum thinks she has to defend your portion she'll get all worried and refuse Tray seconds."

"I guess" I said. I put the still half-full cup of coffee down on the coffee table. I stood up and walked back to the front door. "Bye Dad!" Felicia said cheerfully, giving me a quick hug. "Just don't wander in all the time with that key, it's for emergencies only."

"Like you wander into my house?" I asked.

"Well, yeah. That's home. That's allowed. OK, see you!" I called out to Amelia who yelled something back and then I left as Felicia shut the door almost before I was through it.

Well, that was OK. I hoped it would cheer Sookie up anyway.

Sookie didn't cheer up though when I got home. If anything, she just got more distant. I wasn't sure if that was better or worse than the crying she'd been doing that morning. She just kept staring off into space and I could feel this gap widening up between us. I wasn't sure how to close it. I wasn't sure she wanted me to. I just…fuck. This was fucking difficult. I was worried about her, and I didn't know what to do.

It was just never-ending, all the worrying that went with having a family. I had a lot of people to worry about. Normally Aud was the one…well, not person, but…being, maybe, that I didn't have to worry about. I liked that he just came and went and I didn't really have to care because he had owners and he was just visiting me because he wanted to hang out.

But something was up with him, too, and somehow Aud was not quite the same. He didn't get on my desk now; he just lay on the floor looking miserable. I wondered if cats got depression. I wondered if his real owners were looking after him properly.

I wondered if you ever ran out of people to worry about.

SPOV

I felt like I was never going to run out of kids to worry about. I might have lost the biggest girls, but I was still stuck protecting them from Eric. And I was still worrying about Sam, and how tired he was getting from working every night, and how bored Tray was getting and whether that was going to be good for the sanity of the rest of the family as he mooched around the house and came up with booby-traps he wanted to build for his new room, and I was definitely worried about Pam.

Somewhere along the way she'd morphed from this ultra-confident little five year old, who thought nothing of stalking the nine and ten year old girls who were her classes' lunch monitors because she thought they were lovely, to a quiet little twelve year old who really wasn't looking forward to starting high school in less than two months.

I wasn't sure what to do because in my head she'd always been so Eric-like that I thought she'd be OK. Now I was worried that actually she was going to turn out to be more like me and get lost in the shuffle at high school. Those weren't years I looked back on happily.

Pam, like Eric, didn't want to talk about it though. I hoped that her sleep-over on Friday night helped. Still, worrying about Pam gave me a nice break from feeling miserable about myself. And with dealing what was going on at Amelia and Felicia's flat.

"There's some groceries here" Amelia announced, when she rang on Thursday.

"Well…that's good?" I wasn't sure where this was going.

"Dad ordered them for us."

"Yeah, he does that too."

"I had an argument with the delivery guy when he turned up because I said they weren't for us! He looked at me like I'm an idiot! I'm not an idiot!"

"Yes you are!" Felicia yelled in the background. Then I heard Rubio's voice, and then I heard Felicia yell "Shut up, Rubio! Don't be mean to Amelia!"

"God, they're like… I don't know what they're like. All she does is yell at him, and he thinks she's lovely anyway."

I didn't really have a comment on Rubio and Felicia's relationship.

"So now we have all this food" Amelia grumbled. "We had food…not much food. Is he going to do this every week?"

God, I hoped not. It was expensive enough paying for one household's grocery bill.

"Just…he was trying to help. Ring him and thank him so he doesn't grumble at you, though."

"Oh. Felicia can do that" Amelia said, and she hung up. I think she was pleased. Secretly. Very secretly pleased that Eric was looking out for them in the most Eric-way possible, by just sending them random deliveries of useful items.

I said thank-you to Eric though, when he got home. Just in case they hadn't bothered calling. And because it was a nice thing to do. "They didn't even have any cookies" he muttered. "I was worried they weren't eating."

"I think if they were really starving, they'd just turn up here for dinner." I was still trying to re-adjust my portion sizes. Tray was having a really good time at the moment.

"I just worry" Eric said. Well, that made two of us. And then he looked at me, and I realised that I was on his list of worries. Crap.

"I'm going to go and water the garden" I said. "It'll be a nicer temperature outside, anyway." And then I walked into the back garden.

Friday brought me another phone call, just after I'd dropped Sam at work and Pam at the twins' house. "Tray's here" Felicia said.

"Well, he's a bit lonely." He really hated Sam having a job. Sam was loving it though, and the promise of earning his own money meant he'd signed up for as many shifts as we'd let him do.

"It's because of the coffeemaker."

"Coffeemaker?"

"Yeah." Felicia sighed. "Dad paid him to come over on the bus and wait for the delivery while we were all at work. I nearly hit him with my tennis racquet when I heard him moving around in the kitchen. And he's been through all the groceries and eaten the best stuff. I knew we shouldn't have given Dad that key!"

That hadn't been Amelia's story, but I wasn't getting involved in that one. "So, this was another present from Eric?"

"I don't know. I guess. Do you think that means he's going to come over a lot?" She paused. "Tray! Get out of there!" Bizarrely it sounded as though she was yelling at Ivan.

I hoped she wasn't going to yell at her students like that.

"Oh, I think he just wanted you guys to have something nice" I said. I had no clue about Eric's motives really. Perhaps he really was going to move in with them and he was just fixing the place up to his standards one delivery at a time.

"Do I have to feed him?" Felicia asked.

"What? Eric?"

"No, Tray. He says Dad told him to stay for dinner."

"Well, it might be nice. He's your brother."

"He's a menace to society and our couch is never going to be the same after he sat his giant arse on it."

"What's for dinner?" Tray yelled in the background.

"Nothing for you, retard" Felicia yelled.

"Ha. Very funny. No, but really, what is it?" Tray asked.

I could hear footsteps as Felicia obviously tried to walk away from Tray. "Mum" she said. "I think he likes it here. I don't have to keep him, do I?"

Poor Tray. "Just for dinner" I said to her, and she sighed and said goodbye and hung up, but not before I heard her yell "Get the fuck out of the cupboard, Tray!"

And then I was home all alone. Just me and my thoughts and my hot, dry face. I was going to have to do something about this. Maybe before Christmas.

I was interrupted out of that line of thinking by Eric arriving home. "This place is very quiet" he said.

"We have no children. I sold the remaining ones into slavery to fund that other house you're keeping for back-up in Royal Oak."

"It's just a coffeemaker. They didn't…it was really shit coffee."

"Uh-huh. See it starts like that and then 18 years later you're still here."

Eric looked at me for a long time. "And…you wish I wasn't?" he asked, which really wasn't what I thought he'd say at all. I'd been going for light-hearted banter. I guessed my tone had been off.

"No. God, no. No, I just meant that, well; you know…you did the same things when you moved in with me."

Eric shrugged. "You were worse. You kept trying to make me drink instant." There was silence for a moment. "We should go out" Eric said.

"Out?"

"For dinner. Come on." Eric left the kitchen and I followed, trying to muster the energy to feel excited about leaving the house. I was just…tired and grumpy. Blah, blah. So over it. And so was everyone else.

Still, at least Eric still wanted to hang out with me…at Sam's place of work, I discovered after we parked in the Mt Eden Village and Eric escorted me to the door of the Burger Wisconsin.

"Really?" I asked him, as he stopped to let me walk through the door first. "You want to stalk Sam now?"

"I just…I like the burgers" Eric said, as we walked to the counter. I could see Sam standing with his back to us, watching the grill. He looked so grown-up, it was disconcerting. When did all my babies get so big and competent?

He turned around and frowned at us. "His idea" I said pointing to Eric.

Sam sighed. "There's nothing on the menu with pickles, don't even ask" he said.

"I think you're missing a marketing opportunity" Eric said to him. "You should talk to head office and suggest it."

"Uh-huh. Sure" Sam said, in an almost-perfect imitation of Eric's accent. Eric frowned and studied the menu on the wall. We ordered, and then sat at some of the bar-stools they had down the other end of the counter.

Eric watched Sam make the milkshake he'd ordered. "I don't think he's going to poison you" I said.

"Mmm" Eric said. "I'm just watching."

"He looks so old" I whispered to Eric. Sam was now talking to some of the other people working here, who all seemed to be young as well. He looked quite at home.

Sam gave Eric his milkshake, and then he handed over our burgers and the chips we'd ordered when they were done. "So it's going alright?" I asked him.

"Yep" he said, and then he had to go and take some orders. Two teenaged girls had just come in. They told Sam what they wanted, and then they sat at a little table behind us. I could hear a lot of whispering and giggling and the occasional mention of Sam's name.

Maybe we weren't his only stalkers?

And then in a weird kind of family reunion Tray walked in the door. He didn't see us at first, but went over and called out to Sam. "No" Sam called back. "You can't have anything for free. Go and ask Dad."

Tray turned and saw us, and came over to where we were sitting. "You've got burgers" he informed me.

"Yes, Tray. We do" Eric said.

"So…uh?" Tray looked hopeful.

"Didn't Amelia and Felicia give you dinner?" I asked Tray.

"Oh. Well. They made chicken. But I was only allowed this really tiny bit, because I don't pay rent…some shit like that. Chicken's expensive they reckon. I said it was Dad's chicken so I got some of it too, but Felicia got mean and Amelia got snotty. I don't get them at all. So can I get a burger?"

"Fine" Eric said, handing over some cash to Tray. Tray placed his order and came back. "He doesn't like it when I ask for free extra bacon, but he's my brother. He's supposed to give me free stuff."

"No he's not" Eric said.

"No. He is" Tray assured Eric.

Tray sat on the bar-stool next to me which was annoying as he was fidgety. He drummed his fingers, and then he started spinning around. On one spin, he just about came off the stool altogether, and the girls behind us laughed. Tray laughed with them.

"You're Sam's brother?" one of the girls asked.

"Yep" Tray said, spinning around again.

Sam gave Tray his burger and that kept him quiet and still for about a minute while he inhaled it. I ate a few more chips. Tray ate some of my chips. Eric was mostly watching Sam, and, although I suspected that Eric knew absolutely nothing about the fast food business, I wouldn't be surprised if Sam got a few pointers in the morning. I was just pleased he seemed to be doing OK and wasn't showing us up. I was pretty sure I'd even seen him clean something while we'd been here, which was quite interesting to watch.

And then I realised Tray had disappeared. "So, what are you guys up to?" I heard him say. When I looked he was talking to the girls behind us. Huh.

"Oh, we're going Christmas shopping after this" one of them said. "We're going to get the bus to St Luke's."

"Huh" Tray said, nodding, and helping himself to one of their chips. "I haven't done my shopping yet. I need to get something for my mum."

Well, I'm sitting right here, I thought. But I didn't interrupt.

"You could come with us?" the other girl said. Tray seemed to be eating the rest of her burger for her. It was a few seconds until he swallowed and was able to answer.

"Sweet." He stood up and walked back to me. "I'm off. I'm going to St Luke's. Hey, you like that vanilla-smelling stuff, eh Mum?" I nodded. "OK, see you guys later!"

"Be back by nine!" Eric called out.

"Yeah. Or ten. Don't worry" Tray said, as he walked out the door with some girls I wasn't sure he even really knew before five minutes earlier.

I nudged Eric. "Did Tray just pick up those girls?" I asked him.

"What?" Eric asked. "What girls?"

OK, so he wasn't much use. We got off the stools and went over to say goodbye to Sam. "Did Tray ask those two girls out?" I asked Sam.

"Oh. I dunno" Sam said. "I was working." He shrugged, and didn't seem particularly worried. I was glad he liked his job, but I hoped he didn't sacrifice a social life for it. He was only 16, after all. I felt like he should have been off with Tray and random girls, but Sam didn't look worried, and he went back to laying out burger buns.

Eric and I said goodbye and walked out. Eric gazed down Mt Eden Road in the direction of his office.

"Are you OK?' I asked him. It felt nice to be the person asking that question for a change.

"I was thinking about Aud" he said.

Of course. The bloody cat. All the kids we had to worry about and Eric picked a cat that wasn't even ours to focus on.

"I'm sure she's fine" I said. "And she'll be home now anyway."

"No. I found something out" Eric said. "I followed him."

Right. So now he was stalking cats. "And?"

"And I think he lives behind the offices. There's this little spot under the bushes there." Eric looked down the road again.

"Do you want to go and check on her?" I asked.

"It seems like over-kill" Eric said, still staring.

I realised I was going to have to make the ultimate sacrifice here. "Well" I said. "I want to go. I'm the cat person, after all. I'm a bit worried about Aud, if she's a stray."

Eric looked at me. "Well, if you think, Sookie."

"It wouldn't hurt to check."

We walked down to the buildings that housed the offices and Eric took me around to where he'd seen Aud, but there was no sign of her. "Perhaps she has gone home?" I suggested.

"Maybe" Eric said. "I just…no. I'm sure he lives here." Well Eric was sure she was a he, so I took that with a grain of salt.

"Tell you what, bring some cat biscuits in tomorrow, just not Eddie's diet ones…" Eric rolled his eyes. Poor Eddie. He was a little on the pudgy side, but I think the vet was over-selling it. Plus he was getting older and it was harder to keep the weight off. I knew how that felt.

"So bring biscuits, and put water out too, and see if she turns up. They always come for food."

Eric nodded and stood up from where he was crouched. "I just want to make sure that the office is locked up properly" Eric said, so we detoured to go past it. Poor Mustapha and Diantha, Eric didn't trust anyone as much as he trusted himself with important stuff.

And there, at the door to the office, was Aud. Lying on her side and panting and looking miserable. "See?" Eric said. "I don't think he has a home. And he's not right."

"That's a girl cat" I said. It was, you could tell by the size of the head. And she had tiny paws. Tiny feet and a big tummy. I patted her. And then I patted her again, running my hand down her side.

"Yeah, I would put money on her being a girl" I said to Eric.

"You're not really a cat-whisperer, Sookie" Eric said. "The kids are just joking."

"I think…" How did I put this? "I'm basing it more on the fact that her tummy is very hard…"

"Tumour?" Eric asked. He sounded worried.

"…and slightly squirmy."

Eric frowned, and then ran his hand along where I had. "Oh" he said. "Oh, I hadn't…" He looked at Aud. "Kittens?" he asked her, and she shut her eyes as she enjoyed the scratch under the chin that Eric was giving her.

"I don't think we can leave her here" I said. I hadn't really intended to get another cat. Not right now.

And certainly not her.

Bloody Aud. I was pretty sure she was smiling at me as Eric scooped her up.

"It's OK" Eric said to her. "We'll have you home in no time."

And that was how I got replaced by a cat.

**Thanks for reading!**


	63. Bonus 1: Strange Bedfellows

**A/N Yeah, it's the school holidays here so this has been a bit difficult to write. And some of it was done through the fog of a bad headcold, so I make no claims to it being coherent. I don't think it's great when the kitchen floor lists to the right, is it? **

**And there's an Amelia POV in this one, just in case that confuses anyone when it switches!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

EPOV

I fucking knew I had been right to be worried about Aud. I maybe hadn't been right about Aud being male, but that was a minor thing. The important part was that I'd actually figured out the problem. Well, Sookie had. Maybe she really was a cat-whisperer?

We put Aud inside one of the file-boxes that were in the office, which seemed a little bit cruel, but she didn't seem to mind. She may have even purred. That made Sookie roll her eyes, but I wasn't quite sure what her problem with all of this was. As she'd said, we couldn't leave Aud sitting out here by herself. And it was probably only temporary anyway.

Sookie sat with the box on her knee on the drive home in the car. She didn't look at Aud, just kept fanning her face. Aud purred. Sookie sighed.

Neither of them was a hundred per cent OK, but at least I knew what was causing Aud's problems. As far as I could remember, Sookie had been pretty listless when she'd been pregnant too, and I could distinctly remember having to persuade her off the hallway floor at Kennedy and Danny's house so that she could actually avoid giving birth there. Because Sookie always picked the best fucking times to dig her heels in and decide to argue with me on principle. Not to mention that other people take a very dim view of amniotic fluid all over their rug.

But while I could now pinpoint the root of Aud's problems, I had no fucking clue about Sookie's. I'd thought it was the girls, and the fact they'd moved out of home, but I'd done what I could there and it didn't seem to help. Sure, she might be less worried, as I certainly fucking felt I would be, once the locksmith had been to that house-share of theirs, but I didn't think that was the true problem.

And it had even crossed my mind that she might be less than enthused about Sam getting a job. She'd always had a soft-spot for Sam. Maybe she thought he was going to leave home soon too. So I'd taken her to watch him work. Not really sure what I thought that would achieve, other than having to eat a fucking hamburger with no pickles because no one can get them right in this country, but he seemed to be doing OK. And Tray was…probably still going to go home with the first girl who fed him on a regular basis. But it hadn't really cheered Sookie up.

I kept going over the comment she'd made earlier in the evening, about how I'd just turned up. And stayed. And I felt like maybe, just maybe, the problem was me.

And I sure as fuck didn't know how to fix that one.

SPOV

If cats can look smug, then Aud looked smug. Aud looked smug all the way home, which was her new home, according to Eric. Well, the laundry was. My laundry. Way to push me out of my own space, Aud.

Eric fussed over her like nobody's business, pushing Ivan away with his foot when Ivan wanted to investigate the interesting box Eric carried into the house. Poor Ivan. He was yesterday's news now.

I knew how Ivan felt.

We got her settled in the laundry, and went into the kitchen to have coffee. And then it started up. Plaintive mewling, designed to melt our cold hearts. Well, my cold heart. She was pretty certain she already had Eric's in a puddle at her feet.

"Do you think she's in pain?" Eric asked me, as we sat at the table trying to drink coffee and valiantly ignore the noise coming from the next room. Well I was. Eric was trying to diagnose the noise his damn cat was making.

"I think she's just confused. You can butter her paws if you want."

"I don't think that does anything" Eric said. I was tempted to say 'well don't ask for my advice then' but I didn't. I was going to rise above it, above Aud and her bloody mewling.

"Maybe she needs something?" Eric asked.

"Maybe" I agreed, which, from the look on Eric's face was not the answer I was expected to give. I was expected to come up with the actual 'something' that Aud needed.

"It can't be great, being that pregnant" Eric mused. No, it wasn't, but I wasn't sure I wanted to get into one of those rounds of sympathetic pregnancy comparisons with Aud. For one thing, she couldn't talk. She could only make that horrible noise. For another, I didn't like her. At all.

And I did know she was just a cat. But I didn't have to like every cat, did I? I mean, I liked cats in general. I liked my cats. I loved Bob. Eddie was OK, and he needed me. Stan was…actually I was slightly scared of Stan. Bella was gone now, anyway, which probably thrilled her as she'd spent years trying to plan her escape to a one-cat household.

Aud was just a big freaking pain in the bum I didn't need about now, not this close to Christmas.

"She'll go to sleep soon" I said to Eric.

"I hope so" Eric said.

She didn't go to sleep. Sam came home and asked what the fuck was making that sound. "Dad's new cat" I said to him. "Don't go in there."

"Dad got a cat?"

"Or a cat got Dad." It was one or the other.

"Stray cat?" Sam asked.

"She was. Now she's…renting the laundry, I think."

"Oh" Sam said, and then he lost interest. Tray was even less interested. "You locked Eddie in there" he said, pointing to the laundry door. "Again."

"That's not Eddie, that's…" Tray disappeared into the family room. "I said nine, Tray" Eric's voice said.

"Yeah, but I'm home now" Tray said, completely unconcerned about the whole thing.

"Is she still unhappy?" Eric asked, as he came back into the kitchen.

"She's still making that noise" I confirmed.

Eric sighed. "It's horrific to listen to."

"Yes it is." Well we agreed on something.

"I don't think we should leave her in there."

"Where else can we put her, Eric? We can't leave her out here at the mercy of Stan."

Eric sighed. "Stan…"

"No! Remember how we gave up locking him away for Guy Fawkes night? Because it was easier to replace a cat who accidentally got himself blown up by a firework than it was to keep re-painting doors?"

Eric gave me his frustrated look. Obviously, I wasn't playing along with the 'let's give Aud all the special treatment we can manage' game.

"Look" I continued. "She's a cat; they're supposed to sleep about twenty hours a day at the best of times. She'll nod off eventually. And I'm going to bed. 'Night."

I left Eric in the kitchen, assuming he'd go in to try to calm her down. And he did, I guess, because when I woke up at about 1am, hot and sweaty again, I rolled over to find a pair of green eyes staring at me from the space next to Eric's head.

Great.

EPOV

Sookie was still off and she was annoyed at Aud's presence in the house, which seemed a little unfair. And I couldn't see the problem with her coming into the bedroom. It was better than the yowling; even Sookie had to see that. And she was pretty fucking pregnant, so surely she got a few perks out of that?

Apparently not in our house. All we got was Sookie fucking stomping and muttering and giving me some evil filthy looks. It was actually a relief to take Aud to the vet's to find out that yes she was pregnant, no she wasn't micro chipped, probably she was a British short-hair, and most likely the kittens were coming soon. So all we could do was wait.

The advice I got was to make her comfortable, keep up her fluids, and let them know if looked like there were any problems. Well, I could do that. I could do fuck all to help Sookie out of whatever funk she was in.

When I got home, having discarded the idea of taking Aud out for coffee because she looked like she actually wanted to hang out with me and wasn't just annoyed by my fucking existence, Pam had been dropped off.

"How was the sleep-over?" I asked her.

"OK" she said, and then she went into her new room and slammed the door. That door had been slammed so many times by Amelia when it had been her room that I was surprised it was still fucking attached to the hinges.

But at least with Pam I knew the cause. She was 12. She wasn't the first 12 year old girl I'd had to deal with. One day she wouldn't be 12 and it would be better.

But what did you do if the person slamming doors was 52? I didn't think ignoring Sookie was making it any better. And I just…fuck. It was starting to be fucking obvious that it was me she was so pissed with. I got the dirty looks, and she seemed to blame me for just about everything. For the girls leaving, for Aud arriving…for me arriving.

It felt disloyal to even say it, but the way Sookie looked at Aud, and the way she looked at me weren't all that fucking dissimilar. And then if I thought about that comment from the previous night, the one about me just arriving on her doorstop and staying, it kind of made sense.

Well, she really did want me to fuck off, didn't she? Maybe she did. I couldn't decide. I mean, Sookie had her moments of being fucking annoyed with me, and her moments of unreasonable grumpiness, but this felt different.

This was starting to feel like she was done with me. Like it was the end of an era. Like maybe she only kept me around because of the kids and the kids I'd been here for originally had left now, so…that was it. Fuck off, Eric.

I had hoped that maybe she'd at least wait until Pam turned 18 before she shut me out.

So that left me with…Aud. I guessed. I put her back in the laundry room and tried to settle her down, but she wanted to follow me out into the kitchen. It wasn't a good idea though. I didn't want Stan fighting her, or Tray standing on her, or anything bad to happen to her.

When I finally managed to get the door shut and get back into the kitchen without Aud losing a nose or a paw in the process, Sookie was there, and so were Amelia and Felicia. "We've just _dropped in_" Felicia said to me, smirking. I had no fucking clue why.

"That's nice. Hey, do you think she needs more food?" I asked Sookie. Aud was crying again. It was really pitiful.

"She probably wants a muffin" Sookie said. "But she's out of luck. I'm getting the Christmas cake out. We should try it." She walked off into the family room though, not the pantry.

"So…_you_ got a cat?" Amelia asked me.

"Stray cat I found at work" I confirmed. I don't know if I had exactly 'got' her, more like…well she needed me.

At least someone fucking did around here.

"I want to see!" Amelia said, and she walked into the laundry room where I could hear her cooing over Aud. Aud didn't seem to be purring like she did for me. I don't think she liked being made a fuss of.

"So you're here for what? Cake?" I asked Felicia.

She shrugged. "Yeah…I was gonna go Christmas shopping but I couldn't be arsed. You're all getting vouchers."

"You're so imaginative!" Amelia said, as she gently shut the laundry room door behind her.

"It's too hard to think of something for everyone!" Felicia complained.

"You just don't even try" Amelia said, kind of haughtily. Then she turned to me. "That cat is really pregnant" she said.

"I know."

"What is she? She's all sleek and stuff, not like the others."

"Um, British short-hair. Probably. That's what he vet said."

"Oh, poor thing" Amelia said, which was more the response I'd expected from Sookie about Aud. "It's like…she's some Austrian countess who's run away from home with the promise of an adventure with some charming con-man posing as the second son of a British lord, and finding herself destitute and penniless living in a run-down slum in the East End, and facing being an unwed mother."

Felicia gave Amelia a look that suggested she thought her sister was on something. "Seriously, Ames. You got all of that from one stray cat?"

"Well she might be a pedigree" Amelia sniffed. "And she's having a tough time."

"But, Austrian countess?" Felicia asked, screwing her face up.

"I like that story" Amelia said, huffily.

"I think I've read that story" Sookie said, walking back in and not making eye contact. "At least she's not yowling again" she muttered, and then she looked at me. "Do you want to get the others in here, and I'll serve up the cake?"

I went to get Sam and Tray to come out of their bedrooms. The novelty of a space to themselves hadn't worn off yet, and Sam was looking tired after a week of work. He had the day off though, which I think pleased Tray who'd been getting bored without him.

Lastly I went into Pam's room. "What?" she asked me.

"Um…cake. Mom's cutting the Christmas cake you guys made."

"Oh. That" Pam sighed.

"Do you…are you OK?" I asked. I hoped the answer was yes. I wasn't sure I could take another female with problems I couldn't fix.

"Yeah…" Pam sighed. "It's just…well…Roman…"

"What Roman?"

Pam sighed again. "You know, Flo and Nettie's brother."

Oh, that one. "Yeah. What did he do?" And did I fucking want to know?

Pam frowned and looked upset. "He, uh…well. When I was there last night. We were talking…and, um…"

I really just wanted her to spit it out. The possibilities going through my head were pretty fucking awful.

"Well. He said, that, uh…that he thought I was nice." Pam looked at me with her big, blue eyes.

"And, then what happened?" I asked her.

Pam shrugged. "I went into the girl's room. They were busy phoning this guy they know from school. It was kind of boring. I'd just gone out to get a drink."

"And Roman told you he liked you?"

"Yeah. Just that" Pam said. "It was…" She trailed off, and never said what it was. I thought it was all really fucking odd.

"Well" I said, trying to work out the best course of action. Pam was upset about it, and I couldn't quite figure out why. Possibly it was because half her DNA came from the person in the kitchen who kept blind-siding me with random bursts of emotion, and inexplicable anger directed my way.

Or, possibly, it was because Pam was still too young to really understand what was going on. "He seems a bit…isn't he in Sam's year?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"That's kind of old. For you."

"You think so?" Pam asked.

Well, I thought they were all too old for her, even the boys her own age. Maybe they'd always be too old for her. I'd lost two daughters in the last week; one was now shacked up with a fucking moron, the other was up to God knows what with God knows who. I wasn't sure what was worse. But Pam was…Pam wasn't going to do that, I was sure of it.

"I really do, Pam. I think you should…" I was about to tell her that really she needed to stop worrying about boys and just enjoy being an almost-teenager, but instead she got off the bed and hugged me.

Clearly, I'd been thrown completely off-balance by Sookie's moods and now couldn't pick up the cues from anyone around here. I couldn't fathom why, exactly, I'd managed to earn Pam's love and admiration by telling her to forget her sixteen year old suitor and stay home with me.

"I think so too" Pam said, although she was slightly muffled by the fact her fact was pressed into the bottom of my chest. Poor kid, she just never seemed to get any taller. "You're right, Daddy."

"I am?" I didn't like to doubt myself, but I fucking blamed Sookie for that.

"Yeah."

"So…we can go and eat cake now?"

"Uh-huh" Pam said, before she skipped out of her room. I wished all the problems around here were as fucking easy to deal with as this.

SPOV

Pam looked happy when she arrived for the great unveiling of the Christmas cake we'd made together. That made one of us. Still, it was a marked improvement from how she'd been when she first arrived home. Tray had bounded up to her, looking for a playmate now that Sam had a door he could shut in Tray's face, and he'd been given the brush-off.

Most unusually, Tray had actually accepted that Pam was in a mood and had left her alone. When I'd been a teenager, I'd assumed that Jason had stopped trying to put me in arm-locks and head-locks and figure-four leg-locks because he'd grown out of it. But I don't think he had, at least, not if Tray and Sam were anything to go by. They were as happy as anything to still fight each other, and it seemed to be their preferred method for settling everything from 'who got which X-box controller' to 'who snored the loudest' to 'who owned that t-shirt'.

I guess I'd grown out of it, as had Pam now. She was rapidly becoming a moody teenage girl, and it just wasn't as much fun to torment them. Poor Jason. I almost felt sorry for him in retrospect.

But at least Pam's moods were still fleeting. I wished my moods were over as quickly. I wished I could get rid of the big, black cloud that was hanging over me right at this moment. I wished I knew that this was something I'd grow out of too, that I'd emerge on the other side of it and be better, and wiser and stronger and still have my whole life ahead of me.

I handed around slices of the cake, while the rest of the family squabbled. Felicia and Tray were arguing over something that had happened while he was there on Friday. Amelia was trying to tell them not to be babies, but they weren't listening. Sam was occasionally interjecting, but he seemed really tired. I hoped he wasn't over-doing it at work. Amelia switched to giving Pam the run-down on the latest even she'd been to the previous night.

Eric was still just watching me.

I took a bite of my cake. Oh. It was…oh. "I think we got it right" I said to Pam.

"Uh-huh" Pam said, not really concerned.

"Is there more?" Tray asked. His piece hadn't lasted long.

"Mum?" Amelia asked. "Mum, are you alright?" And that's when I realised that the tears were rolling off my face and dropping onto my plate. Oh, fuck.

APOV

Boy, things were weird at home now. Not only had everyone changed rooms now that Leesh and I had moved out, but Mum was completely off. She wouldn't look at Dad, she didn't seem to like that poor little cat they'd had to bring home, and she cried over cake.

Odd.

More importantly though, I had my own problems. Things had been a bit weird the night before at the function I'd gone to. Well, they'd started off OK. It was our own company Christmas party, which wasn't as big as some of the ones we organised given there were only 12 of us who worked there, and we were down to 10 fairly quickly when Marie, the older lady who did our accounts, and our one lone male, George, went home.

So 10 women, drinking champagne and enjoying a private room in a really flash nightclub, that was going to be fun wasn't it? Well, it was, until Nadia was a bitch and said I was just trying to discredit her so I'd be Phoebe's favourite. I wasn't. Well, not like that. I mean, I just wanted Phoebe to know that the idea for doing that other thing with an Arabian Nights theme had totally been my idea, but Nadia just took it personally that my ideas were better than hers. Some people were totally jealous for no reason. And complete bitches. Just because.

I tried not to let it upset me, I really did. But it hurt. And I knew I'd have to face her on Monday, and that was a really depressing thought. It was even worse when I thought what it was going to be like in the office between Christmas and New Year when, basically, it was just going to be me and Nadia in there, holding the fort.

So I possibly drank a bit too much champagne. And that made it better. Things are slightly blurry though, after that. At least for the next part, because I don't remember most of the others leaving. I may have given the finger to Nadia's back as she walked off, but I don't really remember the rest going. I have some idea that it was just Phoebe and I at the end and she was laughing and telling me I was funny. So, um, yeah.

And then we had sex.

Which was interesting, and very nice, and not something that I had planned on doing when I'd left home that night. And now I'd had sex, with my employer, who was a woman.

I wasn't sure which part I was more troubled about.

Not that there was anything wrong with having sex with women, of course, and I had thought about it. For a while. But maybe not with someone who could fire me.

Shit. I'd fucked up.

I wanted to talk to someone, but Chloe was off in Fiordland counting carnivorous snails for the Department of Conservation. And even if she had been near a cellphone coverage spot, she would probably have said that sexuality was a continuum and I needed to chill.

Well that was probably OK if you'd been raised by lesbians, and were basically a hippy who counted snails and called it a job. I liked my job. I didn't want to lose my job.

My life sucked.

I lurked in the hallway and waited for Felicia to come out of the bathroom. "Are you following me?" she asked.

"No, I just…"

"There's the guest bathroom" Felicia pointed out.

"Mum doesn't like us using it."

"Yeah. But we're guests now, dingbat. It's OK."

"I don't think it works like that. Anyway, she cried about the cake. Do you want to see her stab someone over a bathroom?"

Felicia thought for a moment. "I don't think she'd stab anyone…I think, well. She'd yell, but if she was alone, we could tell her Dad said it was OK."

"I'm not sure that's a great idea either." I didn't like the vibe between Mum and Dad at the moment, but it wasn't that important. What was important was telling someone what had happened to me.

"So…last night…" I began, and Felicia sighed. "What?" I asked.

"Oh, God, I don't want to hear about your drunken escapades with random losers" Felicia said.

"I wasn't drunk" I said, which wasn't true, but Felicia didn't have to be mean about it.

"Uh-huh. Whatevs, Ames. Coming in at 5am isn't cool if you can't find the freaking lock. When we get a deadbolt I am so shutting it on you so you can't do that again!"

Well, that was really mean. "Who says we're getting a deadbolt?"

"Dad."

"If Dad says it, it doesn't make it a rule." Felicia sighed, and raised her eyebrows. "When the guy turns up to fit it, we just won't let him in!" Felicia gave me another look. "Jesus! You're the one who gave him the key."

"For emergencies, you know, like when you can't find the lock. You can come here and crash instead."

"How is that an emergency for which Dad needs a key?"

"It's not, but don't fucking wake me up at 5am on a Saturday again, OK?"

God, she was touchy about stuff, and the conversation wasn't going where I wanted it to go. "So, anyway, last night…"

"You got drunk and fucked a bloke and you don't remember his name?"

"I slept with Phoebe" I said, and boy, did that shut Felicia up. It was so worth it for the look on her face alone.

Oh, crap. It was that bad, wasn't it?

"But she's your boss!" Felicia hissed.

"I know" I said.

"And she's a woman…I mean…" Felicia screwed her face up.

"What? It was, um, well I liked it…" I had, the fact she was female maybe wasn't the biggest problem.

"I do not want to fucking know" Felicia warned me.

"Jeez, for someone who spends most nights moaning like a porn-star, you're really prudish" I said to her. She was, it was weird.

"I fucking do not" Felicia said, vehemently. "And anyway how would you know?"

"Well, duh. But what do you think?"

"What? About porn?"

"Me! Sleeping with Phoebe!"

"Oh. Yeah. You're fucked now. Never mind. The job market will pick back up in the New Year and then you can find something else, but don't think I'm covering your rent for you in the meantime."

OK, well, that wasn't helpful. "Really?' I asked.

"You can't sleep with your boss Amelia! Or don't you get taught that in a Communications degree!"

"Well no, but yes, but…oh, I don't know. It was quite nice, really. She, um…well she knows what she's doing."

"Shut the fuck up! I don't want to know!"

"You're my sister; I need to talk to someone."

Felicia looked at me. "I really wish we weren't right at this point in time."

"Yeah, whatever." She was so dramatic sometimes. "So do you think I need to get a new job…or quit…or, what?"

"Oh, Jesus Christ, I don't know. When did I start career counselling? That's far more up Dad's alley."

"Oh yeah, like I'd tell him. 'Dad, I slept with the woman I work for, what do I do now?' And then I'd have to remember how you do CPR, and I've only done it that once."

"He would have an aneurysm" Felicia mused.

"Yeah! So I just…what do I do?"

Felicia shrugged. God, I knew she was the wrong one to talk to.

"I think" she said in the end. "I think you have to just play it cool, see what happens, and for God's sake don't do it again. When's this phase going to be over with, anyway?"

"What phase? Sleeping with women?" It wasn't that I'd really thought about it much before, but now I'd done it…well. I mean, it would be wrong to think I wouldn't do it again, wouldn't it? Just maybe not with my boss. Crap.

"No, fucking up big-time" Felicia said. "There's just stuff you shouldn't do, Ames."

"What did she do?" Pam asked. Crap again. She was really good at sneaking up on people. "Nothing" I said.

"Yeah you fucking did" Felicia snorted. "She kissed a girl. And she even liked it!" Felicia smirked, and Pam's eyes went really wide.

"You did? Who?" she asked me.

"Oh, um…just…you know…someone I work with…"

"Nadia?" Pam asked. "She's really pretty, isn't she?"

"Not really. No, not Nadia. Um, Phoebe."

"Phoebe?" Pam asked. "You kissed her? Did she want you to?"

"I think it was more that Phoebe kissed Amelia, and Amelia didn't exactly say no" Felicia interjected.

"Well…no…" I conceded.

"Didn't you want her to kiss you?" Pam asked.

"Um…" I wasn't sure what you told your 12 year old sister. "Um…well…it was…OK…"

"And you liked it?" Pam asked.

"It was nice" I said. That was OK, wasn't it? Not too much information?

"Nice how?" Pam demanded.

"Just nice…" I said.

"Nicer than kissing a boy?" she asked.

"Different." I ignored Felicia who was still sniggering in the background. Pam frowned like she was sure there was something I wasn't telling her. Well, there was, but it was all stuff she was far too young to know.

"Does anyone else know?" Pam asked.

"No" I said. "And we're not telling anyone else, either." I didn't need Pam spilling the beans on what had happened. Pam thought about that. "I'll give you that bag you like. The red patent one."

"And…some of that nail polish?" Pam asked.

"Yes, fine. I'll bring it with me next time I come around."

"I want to come and stay. With you" Pam countered.

"Fine! Whatever, just don't tell, OK?"

"OK" Pam said, and she went off down the hall into my…well, now it was her room. That was going to take a little getting used to. You would have thought they could have waited a while, couldn't you?

"Man, if you turn Pam gay, I'm so telling Dad" Felicia said.

"Oh, bollocks. Pam isn't gay."

"You don't know that."

"You just want to argue with me for the sake of arguing. She's got a boyfriend…well. Her friend's brother likes her."

"Yeah, I don't think that counts" Felicia said.

"What do you know?"

"I know Sam's got a girlfriend."

"Since when?" You move out for a flipping week, and you miss all the news.

"Dunno. Tray said. He said he went shopping with her friends. I didn't even think Tray liked shopping. Oh, and you're all getting vouchers this Christmas, by the way. You were there when I said that before, weren't you?"

Felicia had no imagination. I had bought everyone really great gifts this year. We had a supplier who did liqueurs and infused olive oil for gift baskets, and I'd got them to do a huge basket for Mum and Dad. They were going to love the present I'd got them. Felicia's, probably not so much. And I half-suspected Tray was just going to buy Dad another car-cleaning kit so Dad could sit there and say that what he really wanted was someone who was interested in actually washing a few cars around here.

"Yeah, OK. But about Phoebe?"

"Oh, fuck. I don't know. Perhaps she's embarrassed too?"

"Jeez, thanks Felicia!"

"No, just that, you know, she probably doesn't think it's such a great idea to sleep with an employee. You might sue, or, or…something."

"I don't think I could…I mean, I was definitely into it, and she would…"

"Yes, alright Amelia! No sordid fucking details. Just, worry about it next week."

"I guess so" I said. "Hey, do you think we need to do anything about Mum?"

"Mum?"

"Yeah. You know. She was crying over the cake before." It had been really awkward, well, for most of us who weren't Tray. Tray was too busy eating as much cake as possible while everyone was watching Mum.

Felicia shrugged. "Who knows? I mean, it's Mum. Probably best to leave it to Dad. He'll sort it, and before Tray knows it, he'll be awake all fucking night."

"Yeah. Guess so. Although, do you think Tray even notices?"

Felicia thought for a moment. "Nah. Not unless one of them yells out 'free pizza' or something." She was probably right about that.

I hoped she was right about some of the other stuff too.

EPOV

The crying over the cake was just fucking weird, even for Sookie. Even for Sookie at the moment when she was pretty much a fucking mystery to me. I was pretty fucking sure I hadn't done anything to that cake, so possibly that one wasn't even fucking my fault, which would be nice. For a change.

The rest. Fuck. I had no clue what to do.

**Thanks for reading!**


	64. Bonus 1: Sookie vs Aud

**A/N Hello from the land of Mummy I'm Bored. Yes, two weeks is a long time to have to entertain yourself :) For those of you that have been paying attention though, you will have noticed that I have now hit my two year anniversary for the first chapter of Homestay which I posted. That's a long time to be writing and posting continuously on one set of characters. I expect my gold watch any day :D**

**But I have branched out a little bit. For those who haven't noticed I posted two entries to the IWTS competition earlier this week (actually on my two year anniversary, which was a nice touch I thought). They are - **

**Trigger Happy - this features an Eric under a lot of pressure facing down Victor, and a loaded gun.**

**Undressed - A rather hopeless Eric and possibly the world's worst marriage proposal. I set this one in London for a bit of variety as well.**

**I'd love for you to check them out and let me know what you think of me trying something different. **

**And if you want something really different, there's always my one-shot Hole in the River that was used as a promo fic for IWTS. That's a very different universe, and has a taniwha (possibly), plus a warning to be prepared for sadness.**

**My two IWTS entries were both beta'd by Thyra10, which was a lot of fun. Normally I don't use a beta, but it was lovely having someone to bounce ideas off. Thyra's entry Norwegian Wood is worth a look of course, if you haven't already done so. It's a very sweet story. Plus of course her ongoing story Sookie the Shieldmaiden conjures up a whole other way of life using the SVM characters, and I'm really enjoying it.**

**Disclaimer: Two years is _quite_ a long time...not sure...**

SPOV

Eric volunteered to make dinner, which I think was meant to be a conciliatory gesture for I'm not sure what. I don't think he did either, he was just hoping for the best.

I hoped it wasn't because he'd picked a cat over me. I mean, I couldn't blame him. If it really was Sookie vs. Aud, I knew who I'd choose. The one that wasn't constantly grumpy and was likely to produce more purring balls of feline love and affection at any moment.

I could only offer Eric a cold shoulder and a bunch of kids who took up too much room and ate all our food, even when they didn't live here anymore. It wasn't much of a competition.

I left him to his barbecuing and tried getting into my laundry to fold washing. I had to push a curious Ivan away from the door again. He was desperate to meet the owner of the new and interesting smell. But Aud was currently perched in a spare laundry basket, which I'd lined with an old t-shirt of Eric's.

Of course she'd want something with his smell on it, wouldn't she?

"You know, Aud, you should enjoy all this lazing around" I said to her, as I tried to divide underwear between Sam and Tray. I had no clue whose was whose…I'd just make even piles, I decided, and hope for the best. "You wait, you only get this the once. Next time you find you don't get to nap and stuff because there's a toddler demanding you play tea-parties with her and draw chalk pictures on the driveway and even putting Dora on TV only buys you 20 minutes." I thought for a moment. "Of course I guess you won't have that. Yours will have left you by that stage. That part really sucks too."

Aud didn't say anything to that. Well, she wouldn't, would she? I mean, when you hadn't even given birth to them yet, it was hard to imagine them upping and leaving you, and only being left with…why on earth did I still have some of Amelia's stuff in this laundry basket? She'd been gone for a week and I was still doing her laundry. Terrific.

"I mean, you'll always be their mother. And their laundress…although I suppose your offspring won't require a great many changes of clothes. Amelia used to try to dress Bob in her doll's clothes, but he wasn't going to buy that in a month of Sundays. Poor Bob. You would have liked Bob. He was a real gentleman."

I folded some of my underwear. At least I knew who it belonged to. "See you're exempt from all of this drudgery, aren't you?" I asked Aud. "Next time, I'm getting reincarnated as a cat, and I'm going to lie around all day and look pathetic when I want food." Aud opened one eye and regarded me coolly. "Look, I know you had your reasons, but you have to admit, all that turning up every day to wheedle food out of Eric, just by purring and looking all cute, that was kind of slutty. Well, cat-slutty." Aud didn't look impressed with that statement.

"I'm not saying I wouldn't do…well, something, anyway, if I had no food and I was expecting, but I wouldn't go around picking on people who have other families to look after. We had him first." I looked at Aud, but she was trying to go to sleep and ignore me. She felt guilty though, I could tell.

For some reason, that made me feel a little bit better about her.

I delivered the clean laundry as best I could and went to the kitchen to make a salad. "Are you making food?" Tray asked.

"Well, I'm doing the salad" I said, and he screwed his face up. "Dad's doing the rest, talk to him."

Tray sighed. "Well, he was. But then Sam said something, and then Dad said one part-time job flipping burgers didn't make him a fucking expert, and now they're just arguing and no one actually seems to be cooking _anything_!"

I looked out the window. It looked as though Eric had managed to maintain his hold of the spatula, but he was intermittently glaring at Sam who was hovering like he really wanted to take over. Every so often Sam would point at the food and say something and Eric would shake his head for no and, presumably, explain why his way was better. It was like a cross between MasterChef and one of those nature documentaries where lions fight over the carcass of a dead wildebeest.

It was vaguely entertaining viewing, but I had to agree with Tray, I wasn't sure what the overall effect on actually getting dinner cooked was going to be. "Do you think they'll finish soon?" Tray asked.

"Well, look, take out these chicken skewers and maybe that'll give them something else to focus on." I'd partially cooked the chicken in the microwave; I was always a bit nervous about serving it raw.

"No!" Tray said, waving his hands in front of him. "I don't want to get in between them. It's like Footpath-gate all over again. Dad's got that look." Ah, yes. The day Eric's inability to notice where he put his big feet had actually been, in Eric's assessment, the fault of some poor contractor who didn't clearly mark the area with the wet concrete with tape or some other Eric-proof device. Cones on the corners of the patch of concrete didn't count, apparently, and this was conveyed to the poor guy while we stood there and listened, and then had to pretend we couldn't hear the contractor muttering "American wanker" as he went back to get the stuff he needed to re-smooth the surface of his freshly-laid concrete.

Not Eric's finest hour. Thank God we were several streets away from home and out of the ear-shot of any of the neighbours when it had happened, because to this day Eric was convinced that the only reason that firm had won the council contract for doing the job was because they were clearly scrimping on the necessities, like yellow caution tape.

"I don't think it's quite that bad" I said to Tray.

"Nuh-uh" Tray insisted. "It is. Sam said that just because Dad learned how to cook mammoth over an open fire back when he was a kid, it didn't make him an expert on how to use a gas barbecue and he had the temperature up too high. Dad's not happy."

That was probably an understatement, but was it mean of me that I was a little bit happy that someone thought Eric was old too? I'd been feeling so old and past-it myself that it was nice to think that I wasn't the only one.

Even if Eric wasn't exactly facing what I was facing.

"Just take it out there" I said to Tray.

He didn't look impressed. "I'm just doing a dump and run" he announced, and he took the dish out of my hands. I was thankful for that, as it meant I could fan myself a bit. I was really hot.

"I don't think it's that bad" Tray said, giving me a funny look. "I mean, it's not like Dad's actually going to hurt him with that knife…so you know. You can chill." And then he walked out the door. Well, that wasn't great. Even Tray thought I looked odd and Tray would normally only notice me if I wasn't around to feed him, the rest of the time I might as well have been an appliance.

I cut up some tomato and watched as Tray did, indeed, do a dump and run with the chicken skewers. Behind Tray's back as he hoofed it back into the house, Sam seemed to be trying to put the skewers on the barbecue, which required getting Eric to move a little to the left so Sam had some room to get to the hot-plate. Yeah, good luck with that Sam. Eric could imitate a brick wall really successfully when he wanted to.

"They're really grumpy" Tray said, as he jogged through the kitchen and headed into the house.

Yeah. Welcome to my club.

EPOV

I still had no clue what to do. I thought making dinner would have helped, but it didn't fucking work out the way I wanted it to. For one thing, I was barely allowed to make fucking dinner. Sam wanted to do it. Armed with the knowledge of a week or so flipping burgers for a living, Sam thought he knew better than I did about every fucking thing going.

Sam was a pain in the ass and I'm pretty sure he got that from his mother.

When I'd finally been allowed to make dinner as best I could while Sam pointed out, repeatedly, that I had turned the grill up too high and was burning everything, we got to eat it. Only now Sookie and Sam were pissed at me, so I wasn't making much headway. If anything I was sliding backwards. Tray didn't seem to give a shit about anything other than the food and Pam was…well, she was almost like Pam for some reason. I hadn't noticed that she'd been a bit withdrawn for a while now until she started acting like normal.

"Nettie and Flo are going to hairdresser to get highlights" Pam announced. "They said I should get low-lights, but I don't know. I like the pink, still. They say I should get rid of it though."

"I...uh…" Fuck. I didn't know what low-lights were and I didn't like the pink, but I'd been told by Sookie not to say that. So, fuck. I didn't have an opinion, really. Well, not one I could voice.

"Your hair's a pretty colour" Sookie said. "In my day it was perms that everyone got for high school. Except for me. No point."

"My hair's like a nothing colour" Pam pouted.

"It's not. It's…um…" I tried. I really fucking tried.

"Felicia always says Pam looks like a creepy little ghost kid" Tray announced, between mouthfuls of steak.

"No I don't!" Pam said.

"Well, you are kinda pale" Sam conceded, as he poked at his steak and frowned. He couldn't make it much plainer what he thought of my fucking cooking, could he?

"I can't help it!" Pam yelled. "Anyway, at least I don't smell like you two. You're just big, stinky boys!"

"I don't smell" Sam said, holding up a piece of steak to examine it fully. Just fucking eat it, Sam. "Tray smells."

I waited to see if Tray had a counter for that, but he didn't, he just shrugged and kept eating.

"So, _anyway_" Pam said, glaring at her brothers. "They said I can go with them, when they go to the hairdresser. Can I?"

"If you want" Sookie said. "I mean…if that's what _you_ want, and you're not just going because the other girls are telling you that you should."

"Yeah, I know about peer pressure!" Pam said, a little snarkily. Actually the snark was kind of a good sign, I thought. At least she wasn't moping.

"Fine then" Sookie said, and she sighed, and fanned her face, and seemed to lose interest. "I wonder how Aud's doing in the heat?" Sookie mused.

Well, that was fucking new.

SPOV

Dinner went OK except for the competition still going on between Eric and Sam over who had the better barbecuing skills. Honestly they were hopeless.

"They just can't leave it" I said to Aud, when I took the empty tomato sauce bottle into the laundry to add to the recycling container I kept in there. "You would think the fact that dinner had now been eaten, the left-overs picked over by Tray, and most of cleared away by yours truly they would be over it by now. But no, Sam's still muttering that there's a temperature control knob and it's designed to be used, and Eric's just fuming that no one properly appreciates his efforts. See, you wait. You'll have this. Well, they'll fight amongst themselves anyway. I guess you don't have the problem that the top cat is still around trying to keep them all in their place. I think Eric would have liked it if all his offspring could be put in a basket and the lid put over them."

Aud just looked at me and blinked a few times. "I know you got some of the steak too" I said. "And after all those years that Eric kept complaining about any scrap that Bob got. Count yourself lucky Aud; you get all the special treatment. And make the most of getting kitten food, too. You get it when you're nursing; apparently the vet said that to Eric. We can't let Eddie know, though. It took us forever to wean him off it and he'd be thrilled if got some again, but he's a little on the tubby side these days. That happens when you get older. Trust me, I know." I walked back into the kitchen.

"Were you talking to Aud?" Eric asked.

"No" I lied.

We sat down to watch a movie, although I think the kids were only half-watching. Pam was texting someone and I hoped that was a good sign. Despite fighting with her brothers, or, perhaps because of it, she'd seemed a bit happier this evening.

And then the doorbell rang. "Who the fuck is that?" Eric asked, but no one answered him. No one got up to answer the door, either. Eric got up and muttered a lot of fucks as he walked down the hall.

I wondered if Aud's boyfriend had come looking for her. Maybe he wanted to take her off and look after her and the kittens and she wouldn't be my problem anymore?

I really shouldn't listen to Amelia when she got carried away. Aud was just a cat. And cats just, well, they had kittens and they moved on. They didn't have all this…attachment, did they? To their offspring, or each other.

No, that was weirdly unique to humans. Let's face it, if I'd belonged to some species, I would have eaten Eric by now.

Eric came back into the family room. "It's a girl" he announced, and my mind raced to catch up with what was going on. For some reason I thought he was talking about Aud's kitten. "At the door" he added, for clarification. Which was helpful, because some of us were getting on a bit and needed it.

"She wants to talk to you" he said, looking at Sam. Sam sighed, and stood up and shuffled off down the hall. "Who is it?" I asked Eric. Eric shrugged. Well he was hopeless. Who answered the door to strangers and then sent Sam out there to deal with God knows who it was? It would have served him right if I had eaten him, quite frankly.

Sam came back in. "I have to go" he said. He didn't seem all that happy.

"Go where?" I asked.

"Out" Sam said, looking into a spot in the distance. "I'm going for a run."

I was about to ask him to elaborate, when in flounced the girl I assumed had been at the door. She was all bouncy copper-coloured ponytail and perky breasts in a sports bra and tank top, and that was before you noticed the long brown legs poking out of her shorts. Who the hell was she?

"Hi!" she said brightly. I think we all just stared at her. It was probably kind of rude. I didn't care. And it didn't put her off at all. "Wow, I haven't seen you in ages Mr Northman!"

"Um…" Eric said. "I…" Yeah, he had no clue.

"I'm Callie!" she said brightly. "You know my sister, Flynn? She used to be in Leesh's netball team and you brought her home sometimes."

"OK" Eric said.

"And you're out running?" I asked, figuring someone had to add to the conversation.

"Yeah. 'Cos I said to Sam at work, that I'd been trying to get back into it, and he offered to go with me, 'cos it's probably not so safe at night, so I said I'd call round and get him. And here I am." Callie beamed. Sam looked at the floor. At least that answered a couple of questions. Although she'd probably be fine by herself. I mean, the longest day of the year was only a few days away; it was hardly all that dark out there.

"I'm going to get my shoes" Sam said to the floor, and then he left the room. Callie just stood there, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet. Tray stood up. "If you're going for a run, I might come too" he said.

Eric put his arm out and pushed Tray back down onto the couch. "Sit down, Tray" he said. Tray looked annoyed, but didn't try to get up again.

Sam came back in carrying his sneakers. Even the smell of them, which had reached me, didn't seem to put Callie off and she was right next to Sam. The smell woke Ivan up and he padded over to Sam, thinking he was getting a walk or possibly even that an interesting corpse had been dragged in by the cats.

"Oh. Aren't you a sweetheart?" Callie asked Ivan, bending down so she could scratch him behind the ears.

"That's Ivan" Sam said, pulling on one of his sneakers without untying any of the laces.

"Oh, isn't he a lovely old boy?" Callie asked. "I just love animals" she announced to the room at large. I nearly asked her if she wanted a cat, but I stopped.

Who would I talk to if I didn't have Aud?

"Do you like Sam?" Pam suddenly asked Callie. Tray sniggered, and Eric and Sam both glared at Pam. Callie just smiled. "He's alright" she said, and she nudged Sam and nearly over-balanced him as he was standing on one leg trying to get the other sneaker on.

"But his shoes fucking stink" Pam pointed out. Tray sniggered some more, and Callie just kept smiling. "Oh, I can live with a few smelly shoes" she said, giving Sam a fond glance. Sam missed it because he was too busy glaring at his sister again.

"I don't get it" Pam muttered and she went back to her phone. No, well I never understood what anyone saw in Jason either, and occasionally I'd been tempted to nominate Crystal for a sainthood, but eventually Pam would find someone she liked and the fact that their sneakers were rank or they couldn't watch where they were going, hated people making suggestions about their cooking techniques, or brought home stray, pregnant cats wouldn't worry her either.

"OK, well we better get going then!" Callie said. "See you all later!"

"Yeah. Bye" Sam said, as he followed her out of the room.

"Who the fuck was that girl?" Eric asked, as we heard the front door shut.

"That's Sam's girlfriend" Tray said, and we all turned to look at him. "It is!" he insisted. "Grace told me."

"I don't know who that is either" Eric said. "And I'm not sure I fucking care."

"I don't know if Sam knows that she's his girlfriend" I said. I hadn't really liked the way she'd just waltzed in here and dragged him off. It seemed wrong that she could just come in here and get her claws hooked into Sam like that. Poor Sam. And he was so nice; he probably didn't know how to say no to anything like that.

"I can't believe she wants to be near his smelly feet" Pam said. "They're horrific. I was gagging!"

"It was a bit fucking mean leaving Ivan behind, though" Tray said. Ivan had followed Callie and Sam down to the front door, and then come padding back looking dejected. Tray's expression wasn't far off Ivan's.

"You're just sad no one wants to go out with you. Your sneakers are even worse" Pam said.

"Do you think that's really his girlfriend?" Eric asked me.

"I have no clue. I…" I wasn't sure what I felt. I kind of hoped not. But was that selfish?

Tray sighed, and looked around. "Do you want to play _Call of Duty_?" he asked Pam. Poor Tray, he was always lost without Sam.

"No" Pam said to him.

"I'll let you have one free shot at me" Tray offered.

"Two. Two shots before you shoot me. Each time."

Tray sighed loudly. "OK" he said.

I got up to go to the bathroom. On my way back, I checked on Aud. At least she seemed to be settling in better now, and she'd stopped making that awful screeching noise.

"It will be hard" I said to her. "When you have to give them up. People will come and take them away. We'll try to get them good homes, though. And I won't offer any to that girl. I think she's a bit forward, or something. I don't think she'd be a good pet-owner anyway." Aud looked at me from behind the paw she had across her face. I think we had an understanding.

EPOV

Sookie was spending a lot of time in the laundry room now, which was fucking weird, because she was constantly complaining of being hot and, with it being shut to keep the other animals out and Aud in, it was the hottest room in the entire house.

I wasn't sure if she was hiding or commiserating with Aud. I wasn't sure of much. I really wasn't fucking sure I'd ever seen the girl that kidnapped Sam before in my life. Was it kidnapping if he went willingly?

He came home eventually. "Good run?" I asked.

Sam shrugged. "I guess" he said.

"So…Callie? She works at Burger Wisconsin, too?"

"Yeah" Sam said, not sounding particularly interested.

"And…you asked her out?" It wasn't that I really thought she'd kidnapped him, but, well, it was all a bit fucking odd if you asked me.

Sam pulled a face. "Well that doesn't happen" he said. "No one asks anyone out you just…" He trailed off, clearly not fucking sure what happened. I don't think he quite knew how he'd got himself a girlfriend.

"She asked you out?"

"For a run" Sam said. "It's just a run…I mean…she wants to go to the movies tomorrow, but we have to go in the afternoon because we're working…so…I mean…it's just a convenient time for both of us…I guess…"

Poor fucking Sam. He'd been blindsided by that Callie and didn't have fucking clue what was going on. I knew exactly how he felt. I didn't know from one minute to the fucking next what Sookie's moods were going to be like or when this…this…whatever it was, was going to be over. I hoped Christmas, but I guessed I was just a fucking optimist at heart.

"Do you think she thinks we're going out?" Sam asked me. I shrugged. I couldn't work out what was going on in Sookie's head, and I'd been watching her closely for the past 18 years trying to work out what the clues were. That was what was so fucking worrying, this was…something else. And whatever it was, it was something big. It was something life-changing.

Or maybe I was fucking over-reacting. Maybe she was just pissed at having to buy Christmas presents again. Who the fuck really knew?

"I dunno, Sam. I think she likes you though."

"Yeah. She said that" Sam said, still sounding a bit fucking bewildered by it all. He wandered off. Lucky fucking Sam, at least someone liked him. I'd had Aud, but now every time I turned around, Sookie was in there, talking to her. Probably about me, and shit that I'd done that she didn't like.

I wondered at what point it had stopped being Sookie vs. Aud, and started being Sookie and Aud vs. Eric. I knew it was fucking stupid. She was just a cat after all. There were cats all over the fucking place. I'd seen Stan lurking in the hallway just before and I'd nearly stood on Eddie after dinner. He was a fucking moron. If it wasn't for Sookie then the process of natural selection would have weeded him out of the population fucking years ago.

But Aud, Aud was different. I liked Aud. Aud liked me. And she didn't look at me like I was doing something wrong all the fucking time.

This was like PMT, or whatever it was that Sookie didn't get, _ever_, only worse. I was at a loss. I went into the kitchen and looked at the calendar. And then I looked again…because when had the last lot of PMT been anyway? I flicked back through some of the pages, and then flicked forward again.

Oh. So that was…interesting.

Sookie stuck her head out the door of the laundry room. "I think Aud's in labour" she said. "She's a bit…um, odd. I don't know what the signs are…"

Well I had no fucking clue on that one either. But I could probably Google it.

**Thanks for reading!**


	65. Bonus 1: What Counts

**A/N Well this brings us to the end of this group of bonus chapters. So next up we'll have another time jump of about four years - stay tuned for that!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

"Where is she?" Eric asked, when he came into the laundry.

"In there" I said, nodding to the linen cupboard. I'd found her in there, panting a bit, and making an occasional odd weird mewling noise. Also, the discharge had started. Yay. It was a shame about the towels on that shelf. I should have known she'd want to protect that manky old t-shirt of Eric's I gave her.

"Well…should we get her out?" Eric asked, looking worried. I gave him a look. "What?" he asked.

"She wants to be alone." She'd made it pretty obvious.

"Not every creature in labour is like you, Sookie."

"Google it."

I stayed leaning against the freezer while Eric pulled out his phone and started looking up stuff. "Did she make a lot of trips to the litter-tray?' he asked. "Because that's a sign it's starting."

"I think we're past that, Eric." He went back to poking the screen. "Well…it doesn't say they _always_ want to be alone" he informed me.

"But it's perfectly normal if they do?"

Eric shrugged, which confirmed what he'd found out.

"When I was about five, there was a little girl who lived in our street called Annabelle and her cat had kittens. In the bottom of the wardrobe in her Mum's bedroom. It was very exciting and we used to sneak in there to peek at them whenever we could. That poor cat, she must have despaired at having two small girls repeatedly poking her offspring. They were so cute though. And then Mum let me get one, to replace our old cat Tiger, who was really past it. And that was Tina."

Eric was just looking at me. "What? There's no punch-line, that's the story."

"So are we going to have kids traipsing in there to look at Aud's kittens?"

"Possibly. Ask Pam. Although knowing Pam, she'll charge her friends for the privilege."

Eric sighed and went back to poking his phone, holding it at different angles so he could see the screen better. I peeked around the door at Aud, she was still crouched and doing a weird pant and purr combo, but otherwise seemed OK. I left her to it.

"She should know what to do. Apparently" Eric informed me.

"Yeah" I agreed. "I think she's doing OK."

We stood there for a bit longer, both leaning on the freezer. Eric still looking at stuff on his phone. From the muttering he'd moved on from looking at sites that told you how to help a cat in labour, and onto something more…annoying, perhaps? Well, whatever it was, it seemed to annoy Eric.

I looked at my fingernails. I really should file some of them. They were getting kind of long.

"So this is what it's like on this side of the door, huh?" I said to Eric.

He looked away from his phone. "Uh-huh."

"It's kind of stink."

Eric tactfully didn't agree with me. "Sometimes" he said, "there's food."

I thought about that for a moment. "Want an individual lemon meringue pie? I think there's still two in the freezer."

"OK" Eric said shrugging. We turned around and lifted the lid of the freezer. "Um…" I said, as I peered at the stuff in there. "Um…I think maybe…over there?" I pointed to the end of the freezer that Eric was standing in front of.

Eric moved some of the containers that held leftovers. "Is that lasagne?" he asked.

"Possibly." I'd never really figured out a good system for labelling leftovers. Short of scribbling multiple times on every container I had there was always a certain element of chance when you took something out to defrost it.

"I might keep that out and have it for lunch on Monday" Eric said.

"Probably better to wait until tomorrow night and sneak it into the fridge" I advised. "Otherwise you'll lose it."

"Oh, Christ yes" Eric agreed. "Did you see Tray earlier? He ate about four of the chicken skewers cold. After he'd had ice cream."

"Oh, God, was he in the ice cream? I didn't see that. Is there any ice cream left?"

"I seriously fucking doubt it, Sookie. Are you sure they're over this side?" Eric was still moving stuff around down his end of the freezer. I reached into the side I was in front of, moved some frozen peas, and uncovered the box with the lemon meringue pies. "Here they are!" I said.

"So not down this end of the freezer at all, then" Eric said.

"I knew they were in the freezer" I retorted. You try keeping track of every item of food that was in there, let alone where everything was.

I opened the door to the kitchen and checked the coast was clear before I walked to the pantry to put them in the microwave to heat through. It wasn't that I thought Tray was going to leap out and tackle me and steal the food straight out of my hand…but he could be hard to shake off if he thought you were eating something he wasn't.

Mission accomplished, I snuck back into the laundry with the pies on two plates, and forks in my hand. We weren't hiding from the kids…we were supporting Aud.

Also possibly hiding from the kids. There were only two of these pies after all.

"Did I miss anything?" I asked Eric, who was still staring at the phone.

"No" he said. "She made a noise, but other than that. Nothing."

I gave one pie to Eric and put mine down on the lid of the freezer, before peeking around the door of the linen cupboard. Huh.

"She's had a kitten, Eric" I whispered to him.

"Whuf?" Eric said, with a mouth full of pie. You could really see where Tray got that habit from.

"Aud had a kitten. While you were Googling how to help your cat have kittens."

"Well, it said to leave her alone and she'd know what to do" Eric said, bristling slightly, as he came over to peek around the door.

"Yeah…I think it's OK" I said. Aud was purring and cleaning her new baby, which wiggled slightly. That was a good sign.

"She's very quick. You were never that quick" Eric grumbled. "I spent a few fucking hours sitting by myself waiting for you."

"Well…I'm not a cat. And I was quick with Pam."

"That was fucking worse. I thought I'd have to deliver Pam on the side of fucking Grafton Road. You'd need more help than Aud does."

I gave up on that one, and went back to watching Aud and the kitten. Yep, they were OK. And then something popped out the other end of Aud.

"We have to count the placentas" Eric said to me, sounding worried. "That's _very_ important. If a placenta gets stuck then it's bad."

"I think we can manage that" I said, shutting the door gently. I maybe didn't want to see what exactly Aud did with that placenta.

Eric snorted, as he picked up his plate with the pie on it again. "Yes, but we paid Russell thousands of dollars to look after you Sookie, and all those fucking medical degrees and he couldn't keep track of a placenta for shit. Look at what happened after Pam."

I shrugged, and then picked up my own pie. "I don't think that was Russell's fault. That stuff just happens sometimes."

"Well, it's all very well for you" Eric said. "You were out for the count. Pam and I didn't know what the fuck was going on, or if you were coming back. Fucking terrifying."

Well I did feel bad about it, but there was nothing I could do. Especially now. When it was nearly 13 years later. Clearly I'd scarred Eric for life.

"I did come back though" I pointed out.

"Which is a good thing for Russell; because I would have fucking sued. I don't care what they think the fucking rules are here, I'm pretty sure you can still sue."

Well, no you couldn't. Not in New Zealand. But it was Eric's little fantasy where he got to ruin Russell financially, so I didn't like to spoil it for him.

"I think we'll be fine managing Aud" I said.

Eric sighed and put his now empty plate down on the freezer. "I don't know why the vet couldn't come for it" he said.

"Because no cat has ever given birth without medical intervention?" I asked. I was quite enjoying my lemon meringue pie. It was nice getting to eat a treat without several other people clamouring for the same thing. And it was probably only mildly odd that we were standing around in the laundry waiting for a cat to give birth while we were eating.

Eric didn't answer that question, he just huffed a bit. I might have known that he'd want Aud to have all the medical care available to cat-kind.

I was about to take our empty plates through to the kitchen when Tray wandered in. "What's happening?" he asked, eyeing the plates in my hand suspiciously.

"Nothing" I said, pretending I wasn't holding the remnants of our dessert.

"But…why are you in here?" Tray asked.

"Why are you in here?" Eric countered. That stumped Tray for a moment. "Looking for you guys" he said in the end.

"Why?" Eric asked.

"Um…hey. So we're getting the paint tomorrow?" Tray looked expectantly at Eric.

"Yeah, I guess" he said, and then he turned to me. "We're doing a run to get paint for the bedrooms tomorrow."

"Oh" I said. That was news to me.

"Yeah. Dad said. When you were in here before. You're in here a lot today" Tray said. "They're not _that_ grumpy."

"Who?" I asked, because I'd felt really grumpy for a lot of the day.

"Oh, um…" Tray's eyes slid sideways to look at Eric. Oh yeah, the great barbecue stand-off. "So, paint is good. And, uh, Dad? If you want I can fix the barbecue hood so it sits better?"

"OK, but that doesn't mean you can have black paint" Eric said. Tray muttered something. I hoped he really didn't want to paint his room black. That would just be…ugh.

And then Aud made a loud noise again and Tray turned and looked in the linen cupboard. He pushed the door back really quickly, though, and looked very pale all of a sudden. "Jesus fucking Christ. That's just…uh. Fuck. Fucking horrible."

Eric shrugged. "You get used to it" he said.

"I don't want to get used to it. It's the most horrible thing I've ever fucking seen."

"Well, you don't want to paint your room black, then. Next time she'll pick there as it'll be all dark and smell enticingly of feet. Cats love dark places for giving birth in." Eric smiled at Tray, clearly pleased at his winning argument.

Tray gave Eric a dirty look and walked out.

"I don't like the idea of a black room" I said to Eric.

"Fuck, no" he agreed.

I took the plates through to the kitchen, rinsed them, and put them in the dishwasher. When I got back to the laundry not much had changed. Eric was still busy with his best friend Google from the looks of it. And then he put his phone down and looked a little fidgety. "Do you want coffee?" he asked.

"Yep" I said. We might be in here for the long haul after all.

Eric went back into the kitchen and I could hear the coffee machine whirr away. Over that noise I could hear Sam talking to Eric. At least they were talking. And not glaring at each other.

And then Sam arrived in the laundry. "Kittens?" he asked.

"Yep" I said. "Want to see?" It wasn't that I wanted to put him off the idea of sex, but…well. I knew nothing about that Callie.

Sam shook his head. "Callie seems nice" I said, hoping he'd say something about her. I was curious, was all…and I just couldn't understand why Sam liked _her_. I didn't get it. At all.

Sam shrugged. "I guess" he said. "She's OK."

Well it was probably every girls dream to be described by the boy they liked as 'OK'. I hoped Bill had talked me up a bit more to Lorena. Then I had a weird kind of moment when I tried to process the fact that Lorena probably felt much the same about me as I felt about Callie for the same reason, just because. I desperately tried to find a way to reconcile thinking that no one was probably good enough for Sam, and that Bill was lucky to get me and I couldn't.

Bugger. You probably needed to be Eric to figure out ways of always being right whichever way the argument went.

Sam was still hanging around, staring curiously at the door. In the end he said. "Callie wants a kitten."

'Well…Callie can wait a couple of months. And we'll see." Callie could have a kitten over my dead body.

Sam shrugged. "It was just an idea. Her cat got run over." So she was careless then. That figured.

"We'll see" I said again, wary of saying too much and really turning into Lorena. God, was this where it started? "What are you getting her for Christmas, anyway?" I asked Sam. He looked horrified.

"Nothing" he said. "I mean…we're not…it's not like…_that_." And then he walked out of the laundry. Oh well, it would be over by New Year's then.

Eric came in with the coffee. "Anything?" he asked. I opened the door a crack. "One more…and a placenta" I said, before shutting it. Kitten was wiggling; Aud was panting and looking a bit hot and sweaty. I knew how she felt. Best to leave her alone I thought.

We sipped our coffee in silence. It was weird, but it was nice, being here. I was really hot, and the closed up room and hot coffee weren't helping that, but I felt a bit better than I had for a while.

For one thing Eric wasn't annoying me with his mere presence. That was a start.

EPOV

Sookie seemed to be quite enjoying being a bystander at a birth. I kind of wanted it to gross her out, or something, just so we could prove that she might have been kick-ass at actually pushing the babies out, but she wasn't so fucking crash-hot at seeing it.

She was though. Well, she was if the birthing mother was a cat. I maybe…well; I wondered how many placentas I'd have to count. That felt like a big responsibility. I didn't really want anything going wrong on my watch.

There should be veterinary midwifes for these occasions. They'd make a fucking mint, but they'd be worth it, just so you could hand the responsibility over to someone.

"I wish there was something we could do" Sookie mused, as she sipped her coffee. "I feel a bit useless. She doesn't even want me to hold a paw or anything."

"Yeah" I said. I knew how she felt. Which actually felt kind of nice, because, fuck knows, I'd had no clue about how Sookie was feeling about anything for what felt like a very long time now. Mostly I'd just been the recipient of a lot of dirty looks.

But Sookie was actually smiling over me over her coffee cup. "I never thought I'd be a doula for a cat" she said.

"What the fuck is a doula?"

"Oh. Someone who helps with a birth. You know, encourages you and stuff. You can actually hire people who'll do it for you…but I could never see the point. I mean, I had you…and hmmm…" she trailed off, and I wasn't sure whether this was a pause where we all needed to insert the name 'Bill' in our heads, or if it was a case of Sookie not wanting to point out that actually I wasn't much fucking use but she liked to humour me. At least I hadn't been escorted out by security; I had that in my favour. In the end she said "I kind of liked to just figure it out for myself."

"Well, you're fucking good at having babies." That wasn't up for debate. I'd seen it with my own eyes, Sookie was good at it. The whole Pam debacle, I blamed Russell for that one.

He was just fucking lucky I hadn't had to sue him.

"Yeah…" Sookie said, and she took a sip of coffee. "I did it enough times, didn't I?" She looked at me and smiled, which was really fucking nice. I had missed that.

"That's because, and I'm quoting Amelia here, you like the part where you make them."

Sookie snorted. "Yep, that's right. To her I will always be the sluttiest mother on the planet. Poor Amelia, she probably keeps her own sex-life really private because of me."

"Yeah, let's not fucking talk about Amelia having sex." There were things I should not have to contemplate and that was one of them. Felicia and Pam having sex were two of the other things. Actually, I wasn't all that keen on Sam and Tray doing it either, if only for the fact that Sam could be fucking talked into anything and Tray had no sense of self-preservation. Fuck knows what trouble they could get themselves, or the other party, into.

Sookie laughed, just a little. And even though she was clearly laughing at me that was OK too. Well, mostly OK. "I bet that's why you liked Aud" Sookie said, taking a last mouthful of coffee. "Because she wasn't as hard to control as your daughters."

I shrugged. "Aud's nice" I said. "And she liked hanging out."

"Sorry to say she's got new people to hang out with now" Sookie said.

"That's OK." It was, because somewhere along the line I'd got back to hanging out with Sookie and that was actually better. She very rarely stole part of my muffin for one thing.

Sookie took a look around the door of the cupboard. "I think another one's coming" she said.

"A third?"

"Yeah. Three at once seems kind of cruel." Sookie pushed the cupboard door so it was almost closed. I held out my hand for her cup. "That was good coffee" she said, handing it to me.

"Want another one?"

Sookie thought for a minute. "Well, we might be here a while. So, yeah. Actually, I do."

SPOV

Birth was a lot more exciting when you weren't the one who was expelling people from your body. I hadn't realised it would be. I'd never been around other people giving birth before; I hadn't had a sister, and I wasn't volunteering to join Tara in the delivery room. If she was mean when she had PMT, I didn't want to see the version of Tara in labour anytime soon.

But this was kind of nice. All care, no responsibility. I didn't have to worry about how sweaty I was, or put up with Russell and Eric having conversations over and around me, or actually push a ginormous baby out of my body.

This I could cope with.

Eric came back in with my second cup of coffee and handed it to me. "I might just have another peek" I said, putting it on the freezer. I pulled the door to the linen cupboard open a crack and had a look at what was going on. "I think it's kind of cool that she can tear through that little…sac thing they come in with her teeth. That's when having sharp teeth would be useful" I said to Eric.

He sipped his coffee and pulled a face. "Don't think I need to see that" he said.

I shrugged. "The teeth could be a problem though when she has to pick those kittens up. It must be difficult being stuck being all fangy like that. Hands are actually useful when it comes to kids."

"Mmm" Eric said. "Don't forget to count the placenta."

"Yeah, it's OK. It's…yep, there it is. I wonder at what point she'll get fed up with eating them." I looked at Eric, but he decided not to comment on that one. Well, I was curious, even if he wasn't.

"I couldn't have coped with having to pick Sam and Tray up with my mouth" I said, as I walked back to the freezer and picked up my coffee cup. "They were hopeless, I would have no sooner moved one to where I wanted him, and then the other one would have escaped somewhere else. Remember when we had the laundry powder snow storm in here? I swear there's probably still some behind the freezer that I never got to."

"Yeah" Eric said. "They were little shits at times."

"Well…I don't know…OK, they were. But you know, sometimes it was nice. I kind of miss some of it. Sometimes, anyway. Like the fact no one ever wants me to play soccer with them now, I got quite good at it. Remember how, when you brought them home from daycare, you used to have to literally just put them in the backyard with a ball and let them run around for another twenty minutes before there was any hope of getting them to sit down and eat dinner?" I looked over at Eric, who was looking thoughtful.

"I remember that they used to tackle me when I came home" Eric said. "I'm not sure they really had run out of energy."

"Yeah" I agreed. "They were more like puppies than kittens. At least Aud's kids will be little bundles of cuddly fluff. More like Pam."

"Pam's not that fluffy."

"No, but she's cuddly. Remember when she used to insist 'I no seepy!', and then she'd crawl onto you and promptly nod off, or I'd find her asleep on the family room floor with the other kids all fighting and roaring around her."

"Yeah. She did used to drop off quite quickly."

"Well, she gave up naps fairly early on, to be like the big kids I think, and then, boom! Toddler who falls asleep everywhere."

Eric took another sip of coffee, and frowned. "Are they going to sleep on the floor everywhere?" he asked.

"Who? I think Pam prefers her bed these days."

"The kittens. I, uh…I don't want them stepped on. Tray doesn't always look where he's going."

Mmm, yes. Tray maybe wasn't the biggest culprit in the 'not looking where he put his big feet' competition. Footpath-gate, anyone? But I was enjoying hanging out with Eric, and wouldn't remind him of that, I decided. Partially because I didn't really want the five minute lecture on how these kinds of contracts always went to the lowest bidder and cutting costs was what they all did to get the work, and partially, well partially because it just wasn't worth telling Eric he was sometimes grumpy.

I like to think he knew.

I sighed. I wished I was as good at facing up to what I was. Or maybe better at self-deception. Either way, I felt like I'd been trying to sweep a lot of things under the carpet for a while now and it wasn't really working. It certainly wasn't making me happy.

But I had kittens now. And kittens made me happy.

"When Amelia was little we used to go to the pet shop a lot. Especially when I was pregnant with Felicia and…well, things were not always that great. And I didn't know what she knew, and I just wanted some nice things to look at. We used to go and play with the kittens and the bunnies. Amelia really wanted a kitten, but I couldn't have done that to Bob. He was there first after all."

"He was" Eric said.

"It seems so long ago now" I said. "When I just had one child and the sad thing is that sometimes I even struggle to remember what it was like before the…bad stuff started. The times when Amelia was just a little baby and…oh, I don't know. I'm just old now." I drank some more of my coffee and didn't make eye contact with Eric.

Pam came into the laundry with us. "Is she really having them?" she asked.

"Yeah. Three so far" I said.

"Can I look?" Pam asked, excitedly. "Can I take a photo? Amelia wants a photo."

"You can look, but no pictures. Amelia will have to wait" Eric told her, and Pam looked around the door. "Oh" she said. "What are they?"

"They're kittens" Eric said, and Pam gave him an indulgent look. "No! Boys or girls?"

"Fucked if I know" Eric told her.

"Oh. But I get to name them?" Pam asked, looking up at Eric with her big, blue eyes.

"Um…yeah?" Eric said.

"We're not keeping them all" I said to her, wanting to nip that idea in the bud.

"Oh" Pam huffed. "But that's cruel, making her give them all up."

"Eventually everyone leaves, Pam" Eric said.

"Not me" Pam assured him. "I'm never going." She turned back to look in the cupboard. "Oh!" she said, stepping back. "Oh, um…euw!"

"Is there another one?" I asked, going to stand beside Pam. There was, another kitten had just arrived. Poor Aud, she was looking quite tired now. I could kind of understand the whole eating the placenta thing, just to keep her energy levels up.

Which reminded me. Must watch for the placenta.

"Check the placenta comes out" Eric reminded me. I rolled my eyes but didn't tell him I had it under control.

Aud was cleaning the kitten and, sure enough, placenta number four emerged.

"Oh, gross!" Pam said, over my shoulder. "That's just horrible." She gave a little shudder. "OK, I'm going to go and tell Amelia I'll send her photos tomorrow. 'Night." She hugged Eric and walked out.

"Well, I think tonight's sex education is going quite well" Eric announced.

"Yeah…do you think Pam seems better though? Tonight?" She seemed more like herself than she had for a while.

"Mmm" Eric said. "I think she's got an admirer" he said, darkly.

"Really?" That was news to me.

"Yes. That brother of her friends."

"Roman?"

"Uh-huh."

"He asked her out?" He was a bit old for her, I thought. If Sam wanted to go out with a twelve year old I'd think it was strange. I didn't like the girl who had turned up at the door, but at least she'd seemed a more appropriate age.

"He said he liked her. I told her he was too old for her. I think she bought it" Eric replied. I nodded.

"It's probably helped her self-esteem, though" I said. "Knowing some older boy likes her."

"Yes." Eric sound quite terse when he said that.

"Boys are allowed to like Pam" I pointed out.

Eric frowned at that. "It's how it starts" he said. "And then the next thing you know, they're fucking moving in with one of these idiots."

"Rubio's OK" I said. I didn't mind Rubio.

"Rubio's a fucking moron, which Felicia will wise up to eventually" Eric said confidently.

"And if she doesn't?"

Eric pressed his lips together. "Let's be optimists" he said to me, and I smiled at him. Poor Eric, he was never going to get over the fact that the girls picked someone else over him. Hopefully by the time Pam found her replacement-Eric he'd be a bit better at dealing with it.

I wondered briefly if I was doing the same thing with Sam, but I didn't think I was. I was just concerned that someone was taking advantage of him, he was so nice. That was OK, wasn't it? Watching out that no one hurt your kids? I'd been doing that for years now, and I wasn't about to give that role up in a hurry. After all, if no one had taught Tray that electrical sockets were dangerous and stairs weren't something you could surf down, God knows what would have happened to him by now.

What was I going to do when my kids didn't need me to look out for them anymore?

"Is that another one?" Eric asked me, as Aud made another noise. I looked in the linen cupboard. "Yeah" I said. "So that's five."

"Seems like a standard number" Eric said to me.

"I guess. I wouldn't have wanted to do it all at once though." I watched as the kitten was born and Aud tore through the sac and cleaned it up. The placenta followed. All seemed OK.

"Hopefully she can get some rest now" I said to Eric. "She looks exhausted. I'll have to make sure she has some water before we go to bed tonight. I'll just let her catch her breath a bit."

Eric nodded, but didn't reply. He collected up the cups and took them back into the kitchen, and then came back again. "I miss them being little" I said to him.

"They've only just been born, Sookie. How big could they possibly have gotten in the last half an hour?"

"No. Our kids. I miss…well, it's not the same. Anymore. It's all changing."

"They're OK. In that house" Eric said. "And the locksmith is going there on Tuesday. I've promised Tray thirty bucks to sit there and wait to let the guy in."

I wanted to ask if the girls knew about that, but I probably knew what the answer was going to be. And I had something I wanted to get off my chest.

"I've reached menopause" I said to Eric. "I'm never going to do this again." And then the tears started falling and it was just as mortifying as when I'd been crying over the Christmas cake.

"Sookie, I don't think you ever could have kittens" Eric said.

"No!" I said, smiling through the tears. "My babies. They're not babies. And it's all over." I wanted to add that it wasn't fair, because I really felt that it wasn't, but it seemed ridiculous to start throwing that around for something I couldn't change. Lots of things weren't fair. Lots of things I'd already lived through weren't fair. I just needed to get over this…hump. And then I'd be OK.

And Eric would know I was old and useless.

Eric hugged me, which was helpful because I didn't really want to make eye contact with him about now. "I hate to break it to you, Sookie" he said, gently. "But I think it's been a while since I could actually have any children, either."

I laughed, a little. It wasn't quite the same thing, but I didn't want to explain at length why. I didn't want Eric to think I was old.

And then we heard Aud make another one of those noises. The ones that signalled a kitten. I wiped my hand over my eyes and sniffed. "A sixth?" Eric asked.

I stepped away from Eric and looked in the cupboard. There was another kitten. Well, a little tiny thing had just made its way out of Aud to join the others. Only it wasn't joining the others, who were now all snuggled into Aud's stomach trying to find a nipple. It was just lying there, and Aud wasn't doing anything.

"Come on" I whispered to her. "Come on!"

"What's happening? Is it the placenta?" Eric asked, behind me.

"No. It's the kitten…Aud's not getting it out."

"Is it stuck?"

"No, but she needs to…get me gloves. Under the sink."

"What?" Eric asked.

"The disposable gloves. From under the sink. I'll do it."

"Do…?" Eric started to ask, but I cut him off. "Gloves." If I said it enough times, maybe he'd do it.

Eric handed me whole box of gloves, and I pulled two out and put them on, before reaching down and pulling the sac away from the kitten. "Are you sure that's OK?" Eric asked. He was now hovering right over my shoulder.

"Mmm-hmm" I said. I thought it was anyway.

The kitten didn't seem to be moving. Or breathing.

"Is it OK?" Eric asked.

"No" I said. "No, it's…" I tried to think what to do. Eric was rapidly hitting the phone, probably Googling something.

"It's not a magic box, Eric" I murmured, but I don't think he heard me. He seemed to be in a bit of a panic.

I was teetering on the edge of panic myself. Why the fuck wasn't there a nice vet living next door when you needed one?

I grabbed a towel off the shelf above Aud and tried wrapping the kitten up and rubbing it with the towel. "Just breathe" I said to it. "Just for fuck's sake, breathe."

The kitten still looked limp, and didn't move. "I just…oh, fuck. I don't know" Eric said behind me, as he continued to try to find something that would help us.

Help wasn't coming.

I held the kitten up so I could see its face. And I blew on it. Hard. Then I blew on it again.

The kitten squirmed, very, very slightly. And there was a tiny squeak. It was alive.

"It's OK" I said to Eric.

"What?" he asked. "I can't fucking find any fucking thing that tells me what the fuck to do."

"I did it" I said. "It's not dead." I knelt down next to Aud and put the kitten down so she could clean it up. Hopefully it would find its way to a nipple and not get pushed around by its bigger siblings.

Aud opened an eye and looked at me, then closed it. She carried on her rhythmic purring and looked half out of it. Poor thing. Finally she roused enough to begin cleaning up her tiniest charge.

I cleared away the placenta from the last kitten and the one previous, Aud seemed to have lost interest in eating those. She'd probably had enough protein for one night. I dropped the placentas into a plastic bag I pulled out of the cupboard under the sink, and, then, along with the gloves I placed them inside.

"We'll have to take that out to the bin outside" I said to Eric. "So Ivan doesn't get nosy and try to eat them."

"So it's OK?" Eric asked, looking from me, to Aud and the kittens. "It's not dead?"

"Nope. It just needed some help."

I managed to wiggle the towel Aud was lying on out from under her and put that in to soak in some cold water in the sink. Eric knelt down and stroked Aud's head. "Good thing she had you" he said.

"I guess" I replied.

Eric kept stroking Aud. "I don't think it really changes anything" he said. "We all still need you. Fuck, I couldn't find a fucking thing to help on that phone. I have to keep holding it further and further away. I think I need glasses." He sounded kind of bitter about that. I could understand.

I patted his shoulder. "I think maybe we're both kind of old" I said.

"We really fucking are, Sookie."

"Amelia's been telling us that for years. Maybe she's finally right."

"For fuck's sake don't tell her that, though. She'll think she's right about everything. And her budgeting priorities are severely screwed. Gas money comes _before_ shoe money. I'm not bailing her out for fucking ever."

Yeah, he was. We both were. They grew up and they got jobs and they got boyfriends and girlfriends and they moved out, but there was still a part of them that would always be mine, that would always call this home. That would always need me.

Aud though, she didn't need me anymore. "I guess we just leave her to it now" I said. "I'll put some water in there for her. Hopefully she'll drink it."

I got Aud and the kittens settled down for the night while Eric took the bag with the placentas out to the rubbish bin. It occurred to me that I'd been hot and flushed for a while, but it hadn't been bothering me as much.

Clearly, I just needed to be busy with other people's problems.

We checked that the kids were pretty much shut in their rooms for the night. Trying to get Tray to actually lie down and go to sleep was hopeless during the school holidays. Given the choice he'd be nocturnal, but I wasn't keen on the idea of him roaming the house eating everything in sight while I slept, so we tried to encourage him to stay in his room.

It didn't always work.

And then Eric and I were in the bedroom, alone. Only I couldn't sleep.

EPOV

"I think I'm too wired to sleep now" Sookie said to me.

It had been a fucking long night with Aud having her kittens. And that last one, the one that didn't breathe, it was like all my worst fucking nightmares. Six is too many. I knew that. I knew that because we'd never tried for a sixth. The fifth one had been bad enough, when I thought I would lose Sookie.

I couldn't imagine not having Sookie there. And I'd been fucking scared that she was pulling away from me these last few weeks. All because of the menopause. I couldn't really see it made any difference. Periods seemed kind of intrusive and pretty much sucked as far as I could tell, so when they stopped surely that was a good thing?

It didn't seem to be as far as Sookie was concerned. I didn't know why. It wasn't like she fucking needed glasses. That was a depressing thought.

But I didn't think it would make her stop loving me. And I wasn't about to stop loving Sookie.

"Well, it's been a fucking busy night. And you saved a kitten's life." I was kind of proud of her for that.

"Yeah. I did, didn't I?"

"You did. Fuck. Can you imagine if it hadn't lived?"

Sookie was quiet for a moment. "Do you think they still need me?"

"The kittens?" I hoped she wasn't going to camp out all night in the laundry room. I hated sleeping without Sookie and I sure as fuck wasn't spending the night in there.

"The kids."

"Probably. More to the point though, I fucking need you. Don't…just don't…" I didn't want to say the words out loud and jinx myself. Don't leave me, I thought. Don't leave me, don't get eaten up by thinking you're old, don't keep that wall up. Just fucking don't.

Sookie looked at me from where she was sitting in bed, her eyebrows creased as she thought about something. "I just…my mother was never this old. Why am I so bloody old?"

"Maybe it's not age, it's wisdom?" I suggested, as I climbed into my side of the bed.

"I don't think wisdom comes with hot flushes and dry skin and waking up at night all sweaty" Sookie complained. Well, that made a lot of sense. I'd been wondering why she suddenly didn't want me to cuddle her at night.

I felt a bit better knowing that.

"But at least we're still all here" I said. "That's something, right?" That was something her mother hadn't had. She'd never been a grandmother, never seen Sookie get married, never…well, whatever the fuck Jason had to show for his life. She'd never seen his cows, I guess.

"We are" Sookie agreed. "I couldn't…I would hate…I just." She stopped. "I didn't want Aud to lose anyone. Losing people sucks."

Sookie moved so she was leaning against me with her head on my chest. We stayed like that for a while. And then I had a thought. "So, if you can't sleep" I said, knowing what the answer would probably be, but hoping that me asking the question at least stopped some of Sookie's doubts. "Do you want to have sex?"

There was silence for a moment.

"OK" Sookie said. "I do." That hadn't really been the answer I'd been expecting.

SPOV

I hadn't felt like sex for a while now. It was hard to when your body wanted to heat up like an oven every so often. But I figured now was as good as a time as any to give it a go. It had never hurt me before saying yes to that question. Plus it might help me sleep.

I kissed Eric, and then I turned the light off, which made Eric protest. After some discussion we agreed that he could keep his bedside light on because it was only a dim bulb and the light wasn't going to be too unflattering.

So much for romance.

I took off my pyjamas and Eric happily kicked off his boxer shorts and then grabbed me and latched onto a breast. But I was feeling self-conscious. Now that he knew, now that I'd admitted the worst, I didn't know what he really thought about my body. Was I still even attractive to him?

I decided it was better to just focus on Eric. I got myself untangled from him and made him lie back down, while I moved down the bed to help him along. I kissed along his thighs and scraped my nails along the sides, while Eric made little happy noises. I tried very hard not to analyse the happy noises and worry about if they were genuine, or think about the fact that it could be anybody doing this and maybe he would still make those happy noises.

I needed to turn my attention to something else entirely. I put his penis in my mouth and sucked, hard. And then I got a nice little rhythm going with sucking and moving my mouth up and down, and rolling my tongue around when I got to the tip.

Eric's erection started to harden and I could take less and less of him into my mouth. I brought my hand to the base, and then started moving my hand up and down to meet my mouth.

"That's really fucking good" Eric murmured. "You're fucking great at that."

So he did really want me, didn't he?

He started to move a little himself, and, as tempting as it was to maybe see this through to completion and go to sleep knowing that I'd given Eric a nice time, he whispered "You'd better stop." So I did.

Eric put one hand behind my head as I raised it and pulled me further up the bed so he could kiss me. The kissing was still good. I would miss not kissing Eric.

And then he rolled us over so I was on my back, and his hand drifted down between my legs and began…well, doing all the things I'd always loved him doing. And I still loved them, but I just wasn't as young as I had been.

And you could tell.

Eric moved so his head was between my legs, and there was some more stuff I really liked. A lot of stuff with Eric's tongue and mouth that had always, _always_, made me really, really happy. In the past. When I was younger.

Now I was old. And dried up.

Eric lifted his head and reached over the bedside table drawer and I knew what was coming. The lubricant. And while I might have thought I'd gotten over feeling useless when we had to use it in the shower, or after a baby, this time it was awful. This time it didn't feel like a temporary thing. This time I was worried that I was going to be defective forever and our sex life was ruined.

I did the worst thing I could possibly do during sex. I burst into tears.

Eric looked panicked. "Oh, no" he said. "No…I just…I thought it would help. It's OK." He lay down next to me and held me. I didn't say anything, what was there to say?

"We don't have to do anything" he said. "We can just cuddle."

I tried to move away from him to find my pyjamas. I felt exposed.

"Naked cuddling, though" Eric said.

"Oh, um…"

"It's good for us" Eric said. "I read it…somewhere. Skin to skin contact. Releases some hormone that makes you…um, bond. Something like that."

"And we have to be naked?"

"Skin to skin, Sookie."

"Isn't that just for mothers and babies? You know, after they're born?"

"It's for everyone. I can Google it, if you want. But you might have to read the screen to me."

I laughed. Just a little. "Fine. We can be naked then."

We lay there like that for a while, my head against Eric's chest and our stomachs pressed together. I tried not to think about how pouchy and flabby mine probably looked next to his.

Eric stroked my back and didn't say anything. I wanted to say I was sorry for ruining it, but I was too embarrassed. Still, this was nice. We hadn't done this in a long time.

And then I felt Eric's penis twitch against my leg. That was…was that just a reaction to the hormones, or did he really want me?

I shifted my leg away, but Eric just pressed himself up against it again. "I like you" he said. "You're hot."

Well, I was, but not in the way he meant.

"I love you very much" Eric said. I loved him too. I really did. I loved this nice man who was very often the grumpiest person I knew, who would argue his position until he was blue in the face, even when he was quite obviously in the wrong, but who would defend our kids with the same kind of vehemence, even if it meant he was slightly harsh to his daughters' boyfriends. The man who brought stray cats home and watched over them while they had their kittens, even if he occasionally had a little panic when Google didn't bring up exactly the answer he needed.

I loved him. And I wanted to have sex with him.

I pulled back and rolled half-over so I could open the drawer of the bedside table. Eric didn't say anything he just watched me. I took out the lubricant, and put a little in one hand, before reaching over and taking Eric's penis in my hand.

"You don't have to…" he murmured, but I kissed him. "Shush" I said.

When he was hard again, I quickly put a bit of lubricant where I needed it, and then pushed Eric onto his back. I straddled him, and gripped his penis to put it in the right place. Eric was just watching me, and I looked away, and focused on his chest. It was a nice chest.

I took a deep breath, and lowered myself down. "OK?" Eric asked, and I tried not to read his concern as anything new.

"Uh-huh" I said. And I started to move, just a little. Eric brought one hand to my hip, and another to my breast, where he ran a thumb over my nipple.

We hadn't had sex like this in…well, a long time. I concentrated on not thinking about how I looked, about the flabbiness of my stomach or the droopiness of my breasts. I hoped Eric still liked the way I looked, how this felt. I wanted him to still want me.

"Fuck" he said. That was probably all I was going to get out of him. I'd take that as a positive.

I tried to think about nice things. About kittens and orgasms. Mainly about orgasms. I liked orgasms. I liked sex; I'd just maybe forgotten that. Although hot flushes and dry…well, it can put you off.

I tried really hard not to be put off. "Fuck…Sookie" Eric moaned. That was good, I decided. That was good, and it was really good if I rolled my hips a certain way and hit just the right spot. That was very, very, very, good.

I was having a better time than I thought I would.

And then I could feel the tension building and I went for it. I kept moving in the same way, the same circle, around and around and I came.

I leaned down to kiss Eric, feeling flushed and hot, but a much better flushed and hot than I had done in a long time. Eric seemed to be quite enjoying it too. He held the back of my head and he lifted up to kiss me, hard.

"That was nice" I said, when we broke apart.

"Fuck, yes" Eric agreed. "Over?"

"Why not?" Well it was all going so well, let's really go for it, I thought.

Eric rolled us over and I bent my knees, just a little. My hips weren't quite as flexible as they used to be. To be honest, I was kind of glad to change positions before I got stuck straddling Eric forever when everything seized up.

"Nrgh" Eric said, somewhere above me. He'd started to move. That was nice too. All of this was nice.

I hoped Eric thought it was nice too. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and I hoped it was because it was sex with me, rather than just sex.

Eric shifted a bit, and bent down so he could kiss me just below my ear. "I love this" he whispered. "With you."

Well that was OK then. Maybe more than OK.

Eric pushed himself up on his arms and sped up his movements, and then he grunted out a final "Fuck", before he shuddered slightly, and collapsed on top of me.

That was nice. That was very nice. I wasn't even going to complain about him making me all hot and sweaty.

"So…that was OK?" Eric asked.

"Oh, yes. That was very OK" I said to him.

We lay like that for a while, and then Eric rolled over and went to the bathroom. I went in after him and climbed back into bed. "I missed that" I said to Eric, as I gave him another hug. Eric didn't say anything; he just kissed the top of my head. "Not too bad, I thought. You know, for an old chick?" I looked at Eric for confirmation.

He smiled at me. "Pretty fucking fantastic, I thought. For us" Eric said. "We're still us, we'll always be us."

"I guess" I said. It would still be nicer if I didn't get any older.

"And you did bring someone back from the dead tonight. So you know, it was, um…celebratory."

"I think you might be talking it up. I just blew on a kitten and got it to breathe."

"You were wonderful. You always are."

"You're going to make me cry, Eric."

"Sookie, cake makes you cry. I'm not sure you can really blame me."

I hit him lightly on the stomach. "Shut up" I said, sniffing. He laughed.

"It's not so bad, is it?" he asked. "Getting old? With me?"

"There's no one I'd rather do it with" I said. "Plus you're the only person who hangs out with me to watch kittens being born."

"I was trying not to watch too much" Eric said. "Thank God you were there to count the placentas."

"That really worried you didn't it?"

"It was bad enough I nearly lost you, I wasn't going to let Aud go the same way." I wondered if I needed to worry about that statement. I decided I didn't. Aud was a cat, and she was never going to grow old with Eric and have…I guess grandchildren. That was a weird thought.

I decided not to worry about that tonight. I was over worrying for now. I was just going to hope for the best…and maybe throw the duvet off of me. I was really hot.

"That was me" Eric said, sleepily, from his side of the bed. "See? I make you hot."

"Yes, Eric. All you."

EPOV

I still had Sookie. I still had Sookie and she was OK.

And she'd helped a kitten to live.

She was pretty fucking amazing. And she had nice boobs.

"It's your hand that's making me hot, Eric. I don't think it really needs to be there."

Yeah, it did. I could feel her heart beating, and her nipple through her pyjama top and it felt nice.

"Fine" Sookie huffed. "But when I wake up sweaty in the early hours of the morning, I'm waking you up too."

"Don't be mean. I'm old and you've worn me out. I need my rest." Sookie giggled at that, and I dared to move a little closer to her. I hoped she knew I didn't really give a fuck about the menopause, or any of that shit. I just cared about her, and the fact that she was still here with me, and we were still OK.

"I love you" she whispered.

"I love you, too."

**Thanks for reading!**


	66. Bonus 2: Lions and coconuts

**A/N And here we are, back again. So this is going to be another little group of bonus chapters, and it's after another time-jump of four years. It's June and now Pam is 16, Tray is 18, Sam is 19, Felicia is 22 and Amelia is 25.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine, but I like them because they leave me in peace when I don't want them around :)**

SPOV

If I had ever given it any thought, I probably would have assumed that Eric thought about lesbians about as much as a lion thought about coconuts. Lions knew they were there, but they weren't part of their food-chain, so, chances are, they probably weren't that interested. Until, that is, a coconut dropped out of a tree and hit them in the head.

Of course lions and coconuts probably didn't exist in the same parts of the world, but I think it got my idea across.

It had been obvious that Pam had wanted to say something for a while; just by the way she'd been hovering. She wasn't normally that interested in hanging out in the kitchen. But I was trying to supervise Tray making dinner and Tray didn't want to be supervised.

Tray still needed supervision.

"I can cook" he said. "It's not that hard."

I tried not to be too offended at that statement. Maybe it just meant I made it look so effortless that he hadn't figured out what was involved.

"I think you make too much fuss about it" Tray added. OK, well. I must remember to not fuss when I was making his dinner. Maybe I wouldn't make his dinner at all.

"Is he cooking?" Pam asked.

"It's his turn" I reminded her.

"I don't see why he has to have a turn at all!"

"So I won't starve when I leave here, apparently" Tray said, like I was doing this to punish him. I was doing it more to punish me, it felt like, but Eric said he'd learnt from when Amelia and Felicia had left home and the next person to go had to hand their keys back and I really worried that Tray might struggle without a few basic cooking lessons.

Even if I made a huge, unwarranted, fuss over lasagne.

"Is the mince meant to be this lumpy?" Tray asked me.

"Well, no." He'd managed to create something that resembled meatballs. "Um, see that's where the other spoon comes in handy, and you break it up as you go. Also, you don't try to cook it all at once…"

"Yeah, yeah" Tray said dismissively. He turned and dumped the carrots on the chopping board in with the mince.

"Those pieces are really big" I pointed out to him.

Tray shrugged. "I got bored" he said. "I dunno why it needs carrot in it, anyway."

"So you don't die of scurvy."

"There's tomatoes in the sauce" Tray argued. He poked at the mince and the carrots in the frypan. "How long do I have to do this?" he asked.

"Well, watch it doesn't burn."

"That's really fucking boring."

I was starting to understand why Tray's career at Burger Wisconsin had been short-lived. He'd had a job there for a while when, I think in desperation because he was always in there badgering Sam for free food, the manager had suggested Tray work there too. Tray hadn't lasted that long.

"I don't want to eat the stuff he's ruined!" Pam complained.

"If I have to make this, you have to fucking eat it" Tray said. "It's the rules."

"Poisoning your family isn't a rule. We're not the Borgias!" Pam announced, and then she flounced out of the room, muttering to herself.

"Just…put the sauce in Tray. No! Don't tip it, the lids loose…" There was now pasta sauce all over the bench and the stove.

"Well, I didn't do that" Tray said, looking at the mess.

"Um…well. Switch the heat off, while I clean it. We'll have to get another jar out of the pantry." I'd lost Tray as soon as I'd mentioned the word 'clean'. He'd stepped away from the stove and had pulled out his phone.

I wondered if it was just easier to tell him where to get take away when he left home? Or sign him up for one of those meal delivery services for the elderly? Lorena had used one, before she'd gone into a home. Personally, the thought of eating the same roast chicken meal every night filled me with horror, but she'd completely lost what little interest she ever had in food by that time of her life.

Sam came in. "What have you ruined this time, dickbreath?" he said to Tray, who promptly put down his phone and tried to wrestle Sam to the ground. Poor Sam.

Due to his size, Tray had been recruited to play in a lot of rugby teams over the years, but he didn't have the killer instinct that made him really want to trample all over the opposition. Sadly the only person he was ever really interested in wrestling to the ground was Sam, possibly due to the fact that he'd never really got over the sheer joy of waking up one morning, aged about sixteen, and realising that he was now the biggest out of the two of them.

Since then, it had been payback time.

"Ow!" I said, as one of them stepped on my foot. No one reacted to that. I carried on trying to clean up pasta sauce, watched over by Aud, who was perched on the windowsill next to the ship in a bottle. Clearly everything Eric dragged home ended up there.

"You're not supposed to be up there" I said to Aud, and her gaze flicked from me to the scene going on behind me, as though I was supposed to do anything about them. Well, I hadn't told her to do something about her kittens when they were tumbling about chasing each other's tails and getting underfoot. Granted, they were cute. And small. Tray and Sam couldn't really be described in either of those terms these days. But even so. Was it my fault they couldn't behave?

"Alright. Tray…Tray! Are you doing this, or what?"

Tray sighed, and stepped away from Sam, who swatted at him one last time. "Isn't it done yet?" he asked.

"Well, no, because you're cooking it, and you weren't cooking" I pointed out to him.

"Yeah, but I think I know what comes next. It's not fucking rocket science" Tray grumbled.

"It's not even electrical engineering" Sam said, opening the fridge and looking inside.

Not for the first time, I did wonder if Tray was quite this lax at university. He didn't seem to be, but possibly because he was studying the only thing he'd ever really had an interest in. From the age of about 10, when, after much whinging to Eric who then whinged to me about the cost, Tray had persuaded us to let him do a school holiday course that mixed Lego with robots.

Now he was in his first year of an engineering degree and seemed to be getting through it OK. The coursework, at least. The pub crawl was a whole other matter. He was lucky he had Sam to look out for him and he wasn't left lying face down on the footpath at the bottom of Fort Street for the entire night.

Sam came over to inspect what was in the frypan. "The carrot's not very authentic" he said.

"That's what I fucking tried to say" Tray grumbled. Honestly, nothing I made could be termed authentic. The important bit was that they ate some vegetables.

"Did you add zucchini as well?" Sam asked me, grinning.

"No, it's courgette" I told him. "And shut up about it."

"I really think it's zucchini when it's in an Italian dish" Sam countered.

"I thought you said it wasn't authentic?" I asked, and he shrugged and moved away. Hopefully to pour the juice he was holding into a glass and not to drink it straight from the carton. I didn't want to know. I went into the pantry.

"What are we doing now?" Tray whined, sounding like he was about five again.

"This" I said, as I walked back out.

Tray tipped the jar of pasta sauce I handed him, thankfully into the mince mixture this time, and poked it a bit. "This takes a fucking long time" he moaned.

"Well, not if you concentrate" I pointed out. "I very rarely have to stop making dinner in order to fight anyone."

"Only Dad" Tray said.

"It's not quite the same thing. OK, so that's pretty much done and you can put some in the bottom of the lasagne dish…no! Some, Tray. A third. How are you meant to layer it if it's all in there?" Tray shrugged, and looked at me like I'd fix it. I started spooning the mince back out of the lasagne dish and into the frypan.

"So, we should order pizza?" Sam said, looking over at what we were doing.

"Ha, funny" Tray said, in a voice that suggested it really wasn't. "It doesn't matter how it looks, you dick. It'll still taste the same."

"I think that's debatable" Sam said, frowning as Tray attempted to lay lasagne sheets over the layer of mince and sauce and left big gaps in the middle and too much poking over the edges of the dish. I tried to straighten them up and got frowned at by Tray for my trouble.

"Fuck off" Tray said. I hope he said it to Sam.

"You fuck off" Sam countered.

"Everybody, fuck off" Eric said. I liked to think he was joking, but he was…well, half-joking, maybe. More than once he'd complained that Sam and Tray were huge pains in the bum and he really missed the fact he couldn't just push them out into the back garden anymore when they got on his nerves. I liked to also think he was joking about changing the locks while they were out.

In some ways he had a point. They were big, they were really noisy, and they ate us out of house and home. If we'd lived in some kind of ancient tribal society they would have been long gone by now, hopefully with some nice girls who knew how to cook so I didn't have to worry about that anymore.

I just maybe wouldn't have wanted to live in one of those societies where we all had to live together. The thought of being trapped in a building with Sam and Tray's girlfriends, or wives was…well. I would be in charge, wouldn't I? That might not be so bad.

It was never going to happen though. And Tray was never going to go unless he could feed himself.

"Hello" I said to Eric, as he came over to see what was on the menu. "Is that…um, lasagne?" he asked.

"Yeah. Tray's turn to make dinner" I said. I turned to Tray. "So, we're layering now. It's the meat, the lasagne sheets, and then the béchamel sauce. Three times. Then cheese on top."

"Oh" Eric said, in a not very enthusiastic voice. Poor Tray. Although, he did kind of do it to himself.

"Did you add the béchamel sauce to that layer?" I asked him.

"The what to the fucking what?"

"Did you put the cheesy sauce over the pasta sheet?"

Tray looked at his creation, and shrugged. "I'll just double up next layer" he said.

Eric gave me a look that, I think, was meant to convey that he really didn't think this whole Tray making dinner scheme was such a crash-hot idea and would I please step in, fix it, and make sure we got something not only edible, but constructed according to accepted best practices.

Well, Eric was out of luck. If he wanted the boys out of here then they had to be slightly self-sufficient.

Although I doubted I would ever get them to believe that toilets weren't self-cleaning. I might just leave that one for whoever got stuck with them when they did leave.

I turned my attention back to what Tray was doing. "Easy with the cheese, Tray."

"But I like it if it's really cheesy on top" Tray said, adding another handful.

Normally I would have said if he was the cook, then fine, he could pick. But in this case I was a little bit concerned about the other people eating this dinner. Eric had been sent off to have his cholesterol checked by the doctor earlier in the week, and, although he scoffed at the idea there might be anything amiss I didn't want to think we were making it any worse by force-feeding him half a large block of cheese with his dinner.

"No, that is enough now" I said to Tray, who sighed.

"The cheese is the best part" Eric muttered. I wasn't sure whether he meant just generally, or whether it was likely to be the most edible part of tonight's creation.

I maybe didn't want to ask for clarification.

Pam waltzed in. "Oh" she said. "You're home too. And everyone's in here now!"

"Hello to you, too, Pam" Eric said to her.

Pam gave him a dismissive wave and walked out again. No one paid much attention. We'd had a lot of the flouncing and annoyance at our mere existence over the years. Although, by my reckoning, Pam didn't have much longer left to be like that.

And then that was it. It was over. No more teenage girls who stomped around the house shouting at people and crying that only the cats really understood them. That was weird to contemplate.

I looked at Aud. Yep, she was lucky her kittens hadn't done this to her, and she knew it.

Mind you, she had an odd relationship with her own daughter, Cordelia, the kitten Pam had desperately wanted us to keep. I guess it can be a bit daunting, being faced with your younger and cuter doppelganger every time you rounded a corner of the house.

But I hoped my daughters appreciated the fact I didn't hiss and swat at them whenever we crossed paths.

"So how long is it going to take?" Tray said, peering at the lasagne through the glass door of the oven.

"Um…well, when it's cooked you'll know."

"But, how long?"

"I don't know." I wasn't really much for set times when I cooked. "You just have to keep an eye on it."

"Oh! That's so fucking boring! I don't want to stand around here and just watch it cook!" Tray complained. I shrugged. That was kind of how cooking worked.

"How's the study going?" Eric asked Sam, and Sam gave him a filthy look. Yeah, he had a test coming up for his tax paper. The tax paper that Eric had talked him into sitting this year because, I thought, Eric had dreams of having someone to do his taxes for free.

Sam did not like the tax paper, and it really showed on his face about now.

"I've studied" he said. I got the impression he wasn't making any promises to Eric.

Eric looked thoughtful, like he wanted to tell Sam to go away and study more because, at that point in the future when Sam was doing Eric's taxes for free, Eric wanted to know that he was getting a quality service, as well as a cheap one, but in the end he just nodded and walked out of the kitchen.

"Is it done yet?" Tray asked.

"I don't know. You're cooking it" I said to him, as I wiped up the last of the pasta sauce and then washed the frypan we'd used.

"It's not a lesson if you don't teach me."

"I thought you said it wasn't that hard."

"It's not!" Tray said. "It's just…" he stopped and had a think about that one.

"You're just a moron" Sam added.

"You can just fuck off" Tray said, opening the fridge door.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

"Just looking" he said. There was a lot of 'just looking' in the fridge, which was normally followed by "It's just a snack", or "No one else wanted it", or the old favourite "I thought you said we needed to eat it up."

"I think you're supposed to watch the lasagne" Sam advised.

Tray wheeled on him. "Fuck off. I'm cooking, you can…fuck off."

"But you're not" Sam argued. "You're fart-arsing around in the fridge. And Mum's looking in the oven."

"I'm just…having a quick look" I said in my defence. It paid to; I didn't know if Tray was ever going to check the lasagne. He was now eating some ham he'd pulled out.

"Aren't you waiting for dinner?" I asked him.

Tray shrugged, and then said something unintelligible.

I checked the lasagne again. "It's probably not far off being done…" I said, but it was a wasted sentence. I was alone in the kitchen. Apart from Aud. "No. I don't think if I drag a piece of string across the floor it will bring him back" I said to her. "Unless I tie the lasagne to it first."

EPOV

The end was almost in sight. I thought it was anyway. Only a few more years and everyone would have moved out. Hopefully. Although if Sookie kept thinking up new things she absolutely had to teach Tray before he had any hope of surviving out there, he could be stuck here for fucking ever.

I wasn't so sure. Tray knew how to get take-out. And I really liked it when Sookie made the lasagne.

I didn't say that to Tray though. Mainly because Pam decided she would.

"This lasagne is really gross!" she complained. "I mean, it's lumpy. It's not meant to be lumpy."

Tray just looked at her. "You're bitchy. I don't think you're meant to be bitchy." Sookie gave Tray a look that, I guess, was meant to tell him to knock it off. He ignored her.

"I'm not bitchy; I just don't want to eat crap that you've made. I can't believe Mum let you serve this to us!"

"It's not my fault" Tray said. "Mum was showing me."

"It's not her fault you're a waste of space" Pam yelled.

Well it was nice that Pam was sticking up for Sookie, but we could have done without the yelling, especially at the dinner table. "Pam. That's enough" I warned.

"Well, it is!" she complained. "He made it! He should realise he's crap at cooking at give up!"

Tray sighed, noisily. "I didn't want to fucking make dinner! Mum made me!"

"Stop blaming Mum" Sam decided to add.

"Stop fucking blaming me because you lot are fucking fussy" Tray said. "There's nothing wrong with it."

"Aargh!" Pam pushed her plate away and crashed her forehead onto the table. "I can't take this anymore!" she said. "The food is crap and no one cares that I'm forced to eat it."

Tray and Sam ignored Pam. I looked over at Sookie who was gazing sympathetically at the back of Pam's head. Yeah, but there wasn't much we could fucking do. Eventually, she'd grow out of it. Or move out. It was just a matter of counting the days until either happened.

After a while, Pam sat back up again, having realised that no one really did care that she found her dinner that inedible. "Fine!" she huffed. "I'll eat it then! Only so I don't starve."

Tray, who'd long since finished, didn't reply, he just picked up his plate and put it on the kitchen counter, before he started to walk out of the kitchen. "Tray, you're coming back aren't you?" I asked.

"I cooked. Don't have to clean" he said, as he disappeared. Fuck, why was everyone around here so rude?

"I don't think it was cooking. I think it was more like just, you know, trying to kill us. Slowly" Pam said. And then she winced a little.

"Still all crampy?" Sookie asked.

"Yeah" Pam said. "I took some painkillers but it hasn't gone yet."

"Try the wheat bag" Sookie advised.

"It makes me all sweaty" Pam complained, and then she turned to Sam, who'd just been watching her. "What? Just because you don't have to have any bloody cramps every month. It's not fair!"

I had hoped that when the gender ratio shifted after Felicia and Amelia left home, we might be able to get through a few dinners without discussing menstrual cramps. Somehow, I hadn't been that lucky.

"No, it's not" Sookie agreed.

"And Tray's crappy cooking just makes it worse!"

Well, she did have a point about the meal. The lumps were…how did he even get lumps in there in the first place? And the large pieces of almost raw carrot were fucking off-putting.

But this was dinner. And we had to eat it…did we? If Tray had abandoned the table? I looked over at Sookie. "Just…try eating a bit more" she said to Pam, and Pam grumbled, but put another forkful in her mouth.

We struggled through the rest of dinner. Pam had stopped complaining, but she looked kind of pale. I hoped there was nothing wrong with the food. I tried talking to Sam about college, but put my fucking foot in it at the outset by saying college rather than university. I didn't really think it made that much difference. Apparently it did. Apparently, also, I was taking the blame for the fact that his tax course was difficult. I wasn't personally in charge of it. I just thought it was a useful thing to study because, fuck knows, everyone had to pay it. It would be nice to know that you weren't paying too much, wouldn't it?

Sam didn't agree. Sam thought he should have taken another fucking useless course on Human Resources again.

Still, Sam was old enough to fucking figure it out for himself. And maybe move out of home. It was Pam that Sookie was worried about, anyway.

"I hope Pam's OK" she said to me, as I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop later in the evening. Sookie was giving her oven another clean. No doubt she'd already cleaned it since Tray had been near it with his grubby hands, but it clearly wasn't quite clean enough.

"I'm a bit worried about her. I think she might be anaemic, her periods seem really heavy. And the cramps are killing her, especially this month. I think I might have to take her to the doctor."

"Uh-huh" I said, thinking I would leave Sookie to deal with that one. Sookie came over to look at what I was doing.

"Are you Facebook stalking Felicia again?" Sookie asked me.

"No." I wasn't stalking her, just…looking. "It's morning over there, she might be awake." And then she could let me know she was alive, which would be nice.

"She works nights, Eric. I don't think she'll be up bright and early and checking her Facebook."

Yeah, I didn't really like the working at night thing. "I still don't see why she has to work in a bar." I really didn't. I could quite clearly remember paying for her to study to be a teacher. And she'd been a teacher. For about a year. Then she'd flown to the other side of the world to work in a bar in London.

Because, apparently, that was a fucking good idea.

"It's easy money, I guess. And she's been doing a lot of travelling so there's not much point having a permanent job."

Yeah, the travelling was worse. At least in London I knew her address. Knowing that she was on a train in a random European country didn't give me the same feeling of…fuck. Well it wasn't security even when was in London. It wasn't a bad thing that I just wanted to know where she was, was it?

"It's not the travelling that worries me as much as the fucking partying" I explained to Sookie. Just how fucking drunk was Felicia in that photo anyway? And who was that guy? And who the fuck wrote: _Saw you out on your big night, Leesh! Love you, keep on partying forevs :) _. Just…none of it felt fucking right.

Sookie had other worries though. "You should be careful or she'll unfriend you…or defriend you…or whatever. Christ, I sound like Aunty Linda. Amelia won't even let me near her Facebook, so you're lucky Felicia forgot you can see it or you'll be barred. I must ring Amelia, actually. Maybe she'll know what's up with Pam? Some of it's the cramps, but there's something else." Sookie put her chin on her hands and looked at me. I didn't have the answer either. I was more concerned with what Felicia had been up to, and the fact that that dinner wasn't sitting right. Since when did lasagne give me heartburn?

"Are you sure it's a good idea to let Tray cook?" I asked Sookie.

"You do want him to go and not turn up here for every meal?"

"Fuck yes."

"Then he has to learn sometime. Pity the person who actually has to teach him." Well I did, but right now I felt fucking sorry for myself mostly.

"That dinner did not fucking agree with me" I said to Sookie, and she gave me a look that I had no fucking clue about, and then stood up and walked to the pantry. When she came back she was carrying a large bottle of antacid.

I poured some into the lid of the bottle and drank it, and that helped. It made me feel like I was getting fucking old, but life was better when my chest wasn't on fire.

Sam walked in. "Shouldn't you be studying?" I asked him, and he frowned at me. "I have fucking studied" he said. "But it's a hard test and almost no one passes it, so there's not much point over-doing it." He took a banana and walked out again.

Well, see to my mind that was all the more reason to fucking study the shit out of the material, but no one fucking listened to me. I went back to scrolling through Felicia's Facebook.

"I might go and talk to Pam" Sookie murmured, and then she left too.

SPOV

I was worried about Pam. The combination of the grumpiness and the pain wasn't great, and she was very pale…well, paler than usual, which was a feat really. I thought maybe she was down in iron. Shame I couldn't just make her eat pureed liver like she had when she was a baby.

I knocked on her bedroom door. "What?" she asked.

"It's me" I said. "Can I come in?"

"I guess" Pam said, through the door and I went in. Pam's room was neat as usual, and looked like…well, like a grown-up's room. Ever since she'd taken over this room and painted it a lovely china blue, she'd kept it pristine. It was all white furniture, and flowered curtains…and throw-pillows. It always made me a bit bewildered really, like although the outside of Pam was a stroppy teenage girl, inside was a spinster just waiting to get out.

And now that she had Cordelia, as well as Stan, she had the cats to prove it.

Of course if anyone in the family was likely to be a spinster, it was likely to be Amelia. Particularly with recent developments. But that was a bunch of worries I wasn't dragging out tonight. Not when I had Pam to worry about, right in front of me.

Who said it got easier when your kids got older?

"Are you OK?" I asked her, which was a stupid move because I got the standard grumpy "Yes!" from her that they all did in response to that question. I tried again.

"Are you feeling pretty blah with the cramps?"

"They're not as bad now. It really sucks though! I can't believe…how many years do I have to do this?"

Um, maybe I wasn't going to give her the real answer. It sounded like a long time, although I would swear to you that it was only a few years and then I'd hit menopause. It didn't feel like it was forty years at all. "Well…maybe you should go to the doctor?"

"Don't want to" Pam grumbled, and I gave up. Maybe I'd try something more interesting as a topic of conversation. "Did you get your ticket for the school ball?"

Pam sighed, and looked down. "Yeah" she said. "So I just need a dress now."

"OK. We'll go shopping at the weekend, will we? Maybe try Modes on Broadway?"

Pam sighed again. "But everyone goes there! I want something different."

"OK, well we'll have a think about it. I could ask Amelia?"

"Then she'll want to come and be all bossy." Well, that was probably true. But maybe I could cheer up two kids with one outing.

"So, we'll have a think anyway." We sat there in silence for a bit. "So…was there anything else? It's just when Tray was making dinner…"

"I'm not sure it was really food!"

"That's a bit…anyway. Earlier, you were looking for me."

"Yeah…just…it's nothing. Just about the ball."

"The dress."

"Just stuff." It was like getting blood out of a stone with Pam sometimes. She could keep things very close to her chest. Pam operated the same way Eric did and I was permanently on a need to know only basis with both of them.

It could be very frustrating.

I was tempted to send Eric in here to see if he could crack her, because he'd probably had his allotted time at Felicia-stalking for one night, when Pam finally spoke up.

"So…the ball, and stuff. You know, how I'm going with Sara?"

"Mmm-hmm." There was a big group of them going, I thought. They'd hired a limo to take them. I'd done the same thing, only my group had consisted of Tara and JB which had been kind of awkward by the end of the night. I had really wanted someone to ask me to go with them. No one had.

"So, like…well today…I asked her…"

"I thought you knew she was going?"

Pam frowned at me. There was something I wasn't getting. Why did she have to be so cryptic?

"No, I _asked_ her."

"To check if she was going to put in for the limo?"

"No!" Pam said, looking exasperated. "To see if she would go. With me."

"In your group?" I didn't get what the deal was with Sara being included all of a sudden.

"Just. With. Me" Pam said, giving me a meaningful look. I didn't get it. I guess this was what it was like being Eric or Tray. It was really crappy.

"So…why not the others?" I asked. I hoped there hadn't been some big falling-out and Pam had been trying to mend fences with Sara so she wasn't totally left alone at the ball. Jeez, that would suck more than having to watch Tara and JB climb all over each other all night.

"Because I don't want to go out with them" Pam said, confirming my suspicions. I wondered what they'd done to her. Pam looked at me for a moment. "You're not getting it, are you?" she asked, kind of scathingly. If I sounded like Aunty Linda, she sounded like Amelia.

"Well, I don't know what happened" I said, in my defence. "You're not telling me the whole story."

"There isn't a story. I asked Sara to go with me, she said yes. Because she likes me. I kind of like her."

I was about to say that it was nice she had a friend to go with but Pam kept speaking. "Like, really like. You know. Well, you don't. Mum…" she took a deep breath. "I'm actually gay."

Well, who knew that Pam was a coconut?

**A/N So pub crawls are big at university here, it's basically wandering around drinking all afternoon and evening. It's not pretty! Oh, and we say paper, instead of course, so it's a tax paper rather than a tax course. We don't usually write papers, as a consequence, because then we'd get confused.**

**School balls generally happen in the middle of year, when it's winter, for those in the senior school. They're quite big, obviously, and it's the same as everywhere I think. **

**Thanks for reading!**


	67. Bonus 2: Out of leftfield

**A/N So here I am with another chapter which I managed to write despite the presence of the toddler who runs the house. Her father tried to give her a dropped toy the other day and she turned around and yelled "I don't have a free hand!" at him, and wandered off. He blames that one on me, but I'm not convinced :)**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. I have a cat who today, tried to get an onion out of the bag in the pantry and failed. Sad thing was, it was next to the bag of cat biscuits, which wasn't fully closed. He's special.**

SPOV

The oddest thing was that it did actually make a lot of sense. I tried it out in my head: _Pam is gay_. It didn't seem to change anything. Mostly it just slotted a few things into place.

However, while I was doing this, Pam got a bit antsy. And mistook my silence for something bad. "I knew I shouldn't have said anything!" she huffed. "Sara said not to, because everyone would be like 'you're too young to know, it's just a phase, of course you like cock.' It's not like that!"

Well. That was graphic.

"No. I just…no, I'm um…" Pam sighed noisily. What was I doing? Was I processing it? Was that OK? If I said that to Pam would she find it insulting?

So this is something none of those parenting books I'd ever read covered off. I almost wished Eric was here to Google 'How to respond to the news your child is gay' for me.

"I thought maybe the other girls had stopped talking to you" I said in the end. It was true. It maybe didn't address the issue at hand, but I was so scared of putting my foot in it that I was happier dancing around the whole thing.

Plus it really wasn't nice when Pam half-shouted things about cocks at me.

"Jesus, Mum. Why do you always think that?" Pam complained. "Just because…well…just because of that stuff. It's like you think I'm a freak no one will like."

Well, that wasn't the case, but it was true that Pam had been unhappy when she'd first started high school. Deeply unhappy. After a while it became clear to Pam that Epsom Girl's Grammar might have suited her older sisters, but it wasn't where she was meant to be. So she'd campaigned, hard, to move to a new school. It was a targeted campaign, aimed mostly at Eric.

In the end Pam had started Year 10 at the college in the city where Chloe had gone and which was co-ed and less rigid than her previous school. The boys had eyed this change curiously. I don't think they'd ever doubted that they were in the right school, and couldn't quite fathom why Pam wanted to move just when she should have been settling in.

But Pam was happy and that was what mattered.

I guess that was still what mattered.

"No…I just…" I gave up trying to explain it. I hugged Pam, who seemed a bit surprised by it. I did just want her happy, even though there was a part of my brain that wished I could rewind everything and go back to the days of tea-parties and glitter and then I wouldn't feel like I was treading on eggshells.

Oh, who was I kidding? I'd always been treading on eggshells around Pam.

"I'm OK" Pam grumbled, as I released her. "I'm just gay…you know. It's not like I'm dying."

"No, I know." I wanted to say 'good for you for coming out' but would that be insulting? "I'm pleased you told me" I said in the end. "I'd hate to think that you couldn't tell me things."

Pam shrugged, and looked down at her feet. "So…is it bad?" she asked.

"Bad? How?"

"Are you…you know…" She looked up at me. "Disappointed?"

"In what?"

"Me" Pam said, in a very small voice.

"Oh, no. God…no. I think I'd be more disappointed if you hadn't said something." I had an awful image of Pam living her life to try to be what we wanted. That was never going to work. And you had only to see Lorena to see the kind of damage that lie could do, not just to yourself, but to other people.

"I'm still me" Pam said, sounding remarkably like Eric as she did so.

"You are" I assured her. "And I love you, just the way you are. And, you know…I'm almost not surprised."

"You're not?" Pam asked. "But everyone just seemed to think that I would get a boyfriend. And I didn't know what to say, because…well, not interested."

"No. Well, it's not something I can put my finger on…but I guess somewhere in my brain, I knew. It was clearly just buried."

"Like the time you forgot to pick me up from gymnastics?"

"No, that was quite different. That was due to your dad not telling me what was going on and that he'd changed his plans." I smiled at Pam, but she looked worried.

"Will you tell Dad? For me?" she said.

Oh. That was…that surely wasn't me. "No, it's your…" I nearly said decision, but stopped myself in time. Because it wasn't, was it? It wasn't something she could pick and choose about; you didn't wake up one morning and think 'men are annoying, let's try something else.' Tara and I had been joking about running off with each other for years and years but it was never going to happen because we weren't wired that way. Pam was though.

In the end I said "It's your news. You have to tell him."

That didn't thrill Pam. "Oh" she said. "Oh…well. I guess. But not now."

"I think the sooner the better." I didn't want it to fester, and for my own sanity, I didn't want to spend too long knowing about it when Eric didn't. It had been bad enough when I'd found out the story of Felicia first having sex and been sworn to secrecy. I liked to think Eric knew something about that, and just didn't want details, but it never felt right being the sole keeper of any information about the kids.

Pam shrugged. "I'll think about it" she said, dismissively.

I decided not to push her. "And we can still go and look for a dress at the weekend" I said.

Pam brightened, a little. "Yeah" she said. And then she winced. "I might need the wheatbag" she said. "I'm really crampy this month."

"OK. I'll get it." I went off to get the wheatbag and heat it up in the microwave, pleased that was an actual thing I could do for Pam, something to show her I was still her mother and still loved her.

"The weird thing is" Pam said, when I went back to give it to her, "I could have sworn my period isn't due for a couple of weeks."

"Oh" I said, thinking that through. I supposed that you didn't have to worry about your lesbian daughter getting pregnant as a teenager.

"Maybe I'm wrong" Pam said shrugging. "Sometimes I get the cramps for a while first anyway."

I said goodnight to Pam and went off to my own room, pointedly ignoring the fact both the boys were clearly still awake from the light I could see under their bedroom doors. It was difficult, having nearly-adult children in the house. I wanted to give them their space.

I also wanted to tell them it was bedtime and they'd be grumpy in the morning and it wasn't cool to miss 8am lectures 'just because'.

But I didn't.

Instead I dealt with the person who was already grumpy and he hadn't even made it to bed yet. "There was a photo of some guy" Eric announced, and I guessed we were back on Felicia's Facebook page. "He was licking her face."

"OK" I said, slowly.

"Do you know who he is?"

"Did he have a name?" There were limits to my ability to discern information out of the ether, after all.

"Um…Thomo. I don't know if that's a first or a last name." Eric frowned.

"He sounds Australian" I commented, as I passed by the end of the bed on my way to get ready for bed.

"How the fuck do you get that from a name?"

"Well, there's the licking as well" I called out from the bathroom. "I don't know. It just seems Australian."

"You have a lot of fucking weird ideas about Australians, Sookie. I don't think they're actually as bad as you seem to think they are."

"Mmm" I said. Possibly I didn't think as many weird things about Australians as I actually knew about Americans. I finished getting ready for bed, and walked back into the bedroom. "I bet you never thought you'd miss Rubio, did you?" I asked Eric, as I climbed in next to him.

Eric took his glasses off and looked at me. I made a mental note that he'd put them on his bedside table. I kind of liked him in glasses, but I had to admit that continually helping him remember where he'd put them drove me barmy at times. It wasn't like the discarded coffee cups which could be replaced with whatever clean one was to hand until I rounded up all Eric's wayward discards.

"I don't fucking miss Rubio" Eric informed me. "I just don't think she needs to be licked by strangers."

"He might not be a stranger" I pointed out.

Eric considered that. "I think, Sookie, that makes it worse." I patted his arm. Not much he could do about it from here.

"So…is Pam OK?" Eric asked, as he switched off the light and lay down.

"Oh. Yeah." I was trying not to give Eric any reason to think I was keeping things from him. It was hard and I hoped Pam 'fessed up soon. "She was just crampy" I said, as I reached for my book.

"Mmm." Yep, that was a sure-fire way to make Eric lose interest pretty quickly. "'Night" he said, and it wasn't long before he was snoring ever so slightly.

I lay down and tossed and turned for a bit, and eventually fell asleep too. But then I woke up at about 3am, thinking of Pam. Also, I was hot and crowded. I bet I knew who was to blame for that.

"Go away, Claude!" I whispered. Claude didn't do anything. I tried to go back to sleep, but his fur was tickling my ear and he was taking up a lot of space on my pillow.

Sometimes I regretted saving Claude.

He had been Aud's last kitten, the tiny one I'd had to help when he was born. And since then I'd been kind of fond of him. And he seemed to be quite attached to me. So when it came down to it, I couldn't give him away. Especially not to Callie, who'd been very taken with him when she'd come to pick a kitten.

In the end she'd gone home with one of Claude's sisters and I'd kept Claude, much to Eric's disgust, because we didn't need another cat.

Well we hadn't needed Aud either, but she was still here.

Claude was just a bit clingy though. And annoyingly persistent.

My whispered hiss at Claude had woken Eric up. "That fucking cat" he said, rolling over and picking Claude up with one hand under Claude's stomach. "Fuck off, Claude." Eric put Claude on the floor on his side of the bed, and tried to get comfortable again.

Claude calmly walked around the bed and jumped back on my pillow.

"I'm going to make him into a fucking fur rug" Eric mumbled.

"Well, he's making a good attempt at fur hat at the moment" I said, trying to get clear of Claude's long, black fur which was now covering my forehead and eyes.

"Just push him off" Eric said.

"If only it was that easy, Eric." There wasn't much for it; I'd just have to make do and try to get back to sleep.

And surprisingly, despite the presence of Claude's furry bottom on my pillow, I did.

EPOV

There were mornings I just didn't want to see what was going on in the kitchen, if the noise coming from it was anything to go by. Fuck, I had thought that with fewer kids there'd be less fucking noise. Felicia liked to shout and Amelia could conjure a dramatic moment which required a long diatribe directed at all of us out of thin air. There should have been a noticeable improvement when they moved out.

There hadn't been. If anything, it got worse as the other kids decided to fill in for them. Tray, in particular, seemed incapable of having a conversation at a volume level below fucking jet engine, and Pam was now a master of the yell-stomp-door slam manoeuvre, and she wasn't above putting it into practice on a pretty fucking regular basis.

It wasn't too much to ask, surely, that they'd just shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes so I could have a cup of coffee in peace?

Apparently it was. Also, I couldn't even sit at the table without sharing it with fucking Claude. "Fuck off, Claude" I said, as I tried to push him off. The fucker didn't want to go and he dug his heels in.

"Watch he doesn't scratch the table" Sookie said to me.

"Well…if he fucking does, he can find a new home." I picked Claude up and put him on the floor. He jumped back on the fucking table.

"You're a little shit, you are" I said to him and he ignored me and went back to washing his fur. Over by the kitchen sink, Sookie was talking to Aud. "You should be doing something, Aud. He's your responsibility."

And then we heard Tray's voice in the family room. "Fuck off, you fucking dick. You don't know shit." Tray arrived in the kitchen with us, and proceeded to…just take up all the available fucking space. The space that Claude wasn't occupying.

"What?" Sookie said, and for a moment I thought she was talking to me, until I realised she was still looking at Aud, who was on the windowsill. At least the windowsill was out of the way, unlike fucking Claude's perch. He was now lying on his side taking up as much fucking space as possible. "I'm not in charge of him anymore" Sookie said, and I guessed she was talking about Tray.

It was nice she had Aud to talk to. Maybe. Or was it odd? I couldn't fucking tell, but as long as she occasionally talked to me as well, and was happy, I left her to it. At least she didn't seem upset about the fact Aud lived here these days.

Might have been nicer if we had a few less cats, though. Because really, who needs five fucking cats?

Especially when Tray fucking stood on them all. Cordelia squealed and ran out of the room as Tray looked at his feet. "Where'd she come from?" he asked.

"I think she was there first" Sookie pointed out. "She probably wonders where the great bloody foot that squished her came from."

Tray shrugged. "Cats are meant to be agile" he said. He put his jacket over the back of one of the chairs and disappeared into the pantry. "Where's the Weetbix?" he yelled out of there.

"Where do you think?" Sookie yelled back. I couldn't help but wonder that if she didn't yell back, maybe Tray wouldn't be yelling in the first place. It just seemed to encourage him.

But I didn't want to say it to her. And make her feel bad.

"Can't see it!" Tray called out.

"Try looking harder!" Sookie replied.

Sam came in and barged into the pantry. It was a fucking tight fit with the two of them in there. "There!" Sam said, and Tray emerged carrying a box of Weetbix.

Sam walked out after him. "I don't know why you can't use your own fucking eyes" Sam grumbled. Tray shrugged, probably past caring that he couldn't find the cereal now that Sam had done it for him. If Sam ever moved out, Tray was going to be fucking lost.

Or a terrible burden to Sookie and me. It was one thing teaching him cooking, but how the fuck did you teach someone to open their eyes and look for things? I didn't know.

I hoped Sookie did.

I picked up my phone and stared at the screen, although it was difficult to read without my glasses. They were a fucking pain in the ass. I wondered where they'd gone this time.

I hoped Sookie located them at some point as she was moving around the house.

Tray had now emptied most of the box of Weetbix into a bowl while Sam stood by watching impatiently. "Are you done yet?" he asked Tray.

"Yeah, yeah. Fuck off" Tray said mildly, pushing the box to Sam. Pam entered the kitchen, or, rather, she appeared at my elbow.

"Morning, Pam" I said to her, and she looked at me warily. "Morning" she said in the end, before she went off to the toaster. There was something up with Pam. She was quieter than usual and…Christ, I hoped this wasn't like the time Felicia went quiet and withdrawn and, well, fuck. I had never wanted to know the details but it was pretty clear some little shit had done something to her.

I wondered if the same thing had happened to Pam. She'd never really been that into boys, though, which was a fucking good thing as far as I was concerned. Teenage boys were just a waste of fucking space most of the time. It was bad enough when you were stuck living with them, and they took up all the space and ate all the fucking food in the house. It was worse when they wanted to slobber all over your daughters.

So I didn't know what this was about. She got a glass of water and then took some pain pills out of the pantry. "Still crampy?" Sookie asked.

Pam nodded. Well, that made some sense. She was clearly in pain and that had made her so fucking quiet.

She was looking at me though. She looked kind of guilty. Fuck, I hoped she hadn't done anything I didn't want to know about.

"Stop being so fucking gay!" Tray yelled at Sam. "Just pour the fucking sugar on." Tray demonstrated this approach by adding half the contents of the sugar bowl to his breakfast.

"I'm not gay. You're fucking gay. And a moron" Sam muttered.

Over by the counter Sookie was looking at Pam, who was studying the toaster intently. In the end Sookie turned on Tray and Sam. "Please don't use that as an insult" she said to them.

"What? Moron?" Sam asked, thankfully between mouthfuls.

"Yow'we a fuggin' mowrun" Tray said, without swallowing any of his food first. Sometimes it was like living with a Neanderthal.

"No. Gay" Sookie said, pressing her lips together and stealing a quick glance at Pam who didn't return it. I tried to figure out what could be going on there. I wondered whether Pam had had one of those tolerance meetings at school again and had come home to Sookie and complained her brothers were the least politically correct people she knew. She'd be right, but there was no point trying to change them now. We were fucking stuck with them.

And her school had some fucking odd ideas about inclusiveness anyway. It all seemed a bit…well, lax to me. But Pam was happy, and she was still doing well, better, if anything, since she'd changed schools and I guessed that was all that mattered.

"But he is gay" Tray said, pointing at Sam with the elbow of the arm holding his spoon.

"Fuck off" Sam said.

"Just…don't do it anymore" Sookie said, as Pam took her toast out of the toaster and started putting butter and jam on it.

"Am I allowed to tell Claude he's gay? He looks gay. I think it's kind of gay to wash your own bollocks like that" Tray asked, looking at Claude who was still on the table.

"I think it's kind of gross to do it on the table" Sam added.

I reached over and pushed Claude off the table.

"Not even the cats" Sookie said. "Don't call anyone gay."

"Unless they are" Pam said. "Then it's OK." Yep, that confirmed my suspicions about this being some kind of learning exercise from her school. They'd probably been sitting in a circle discussing how they weren't going to hurt people's feelings by grading any of their fucking work anymore, and instead they'd operate on a system of smiley faces awarded in increasing levels of glitter intensity.

Ivan roused himself from his place by the door to the deck and padded over, very slowly. Poor Ivan, he was so fucking old now. For a dog, anyway. It was an effort to even walk down the street but he pushed himself to do it thinking, I guessed, that I'd be lonely if he didn't come with me.

Well I wouldn't be walking down the street if it wasn't for Ivan. But I might still be lonely without him.

However this morning Ivan wasn't particularly interested in me, he went straight to Tray's jacket and started sniffing it.

"You haven't still fucking got it, have you?" Sam said to Tray.

"What?" Tray asked, and he looked at what Ivan was doing. "Oh. Yeah. Forgot about that." He put his cereal bowl down and reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out…"Is that a pie?" I asked him.

"Yep" he said. "From yesterday."

"It was the spare" Sam informed me.

"What?"

Tray sighed. "We stopped on the way to Uni to get petrol and I got two pies from the service station, one for then, one for later. This was the one for later."

"You spent the whole day with a pie in your jacket pocket?" Sookie asked him.

"Yeah. It's got plastic on it" Tray said, removing the plastic, and taking a big bite. Everyone else in the room pulled a face. "It's alright" Tray said, taking another bite.

"It's a day-old pie" Sookie pointed out. "How much bacteria are you eating now?"

Tray shrugged. "Don't want to waste it" he said. He broke off a piece and dropped it for Ivan, who completely missed it as his eyesight wasn't the best these days. Luckily his sense of smell was still OK, so he found his treat pretty quickly and gobbled it up, leaving a smear of gravy on the floor. They were both as fucking bad as each other, Tray and Ivan.

"It's a total waste of time teaching him to cook, Mum" Sam said. "He can just forage from the rubbish for his meals."

"I forgot about it yesterday" Tray continued. "'cos of that shock."

"What shock?" I asked, although I probably didn't want to hear the answer.

"Oh, it was…you know. Just a shock."

"Electric shock?" Sookie asked.

"Mmm" Tray confirmed, his mouth full of pie.

"Are you actually fucking qualified to touch anything electrical?" I asked Tray.

Tray shrugged. "I'm allowed in the lab" he said, which didn't really tell me much. Fuck knows what he'd been doing at the time. Or who else might have been involved. Or injured. Fuck, how much of a liability was he? And was he likely to be sued? I'd never heard of a lawsuit being settled in fucking pies.

Tray dropped another piece for Ivan, then crumpled up the plastic wrapper and threw it at the trashcan. He missed.

"That was a fucking gay shot" Sam commented.

Tray shrugged. "Not as gay as your haircut." He walked over and picked up his trash, which I was fucking thankful for because Ivan had picked up the scent of it and if he ate plastic it never agreed with him.

"Stop saying everything's gay!" Pam yelled at them, before she stomped out of the room. Yeah, see, that was more fucking like it. Over-blown drama and stomping I could deal with. Quietness and pallor was just fucking terrifying.

Sookie looked at Sam and Tray. "Just cut it out, you two."

"Pam's not the PC police" Tray said. "Hey, that rhymes."

"No, it doesn't, you fucking idiot" Sam spat out.

"Yeah, it does. All 'p's'."

Sam shook his head. "I should never have done all your fucking English assignments, should I?"

Tray shrugged. "I'm shit at English." From what we had learned, sometime later, it hadn't been an entirely one-sided arrangement because, in return, Tray had been doing some of Sam's math homework on a regular basis. I wasn't particularly fucking thrilled with either of them when I'd found out, but at least they'd both fucking made it through high school and were unlikely to be able to do the same thing now they were studying such different courses at college. Or university. Or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it.

Bottom line, they mostly kept the fuck away from each other's work and it was probably a good thing.

The boys left, Tray trying to put Sam in a fucking headlock as they did so, and I noticed that Sookie was still looking in the direction of the door. "Pam OK?" I asked.

"Yeah…" she said, not sounding very convincing. She thought for a moment, and then finally said "Ball's coming up."

Oh fuck. The school ball. This was the last kid we had to get through one, and I was glad of that. They were a big fucking drama that involved having the right outfit, the right friends to go with, the right ride, the right fucking invitation to an after-party, preferably one alcohol-free and with plenty of supervision. Or not, as with the case with that one Sam had gone to with that Callie girl he was dating at the time.

And then at the end of it all, when the tears had been shed and the friendships broken up and the relationships shattered after Sam's fucking girlfriend ran off with someone else at the fucking after party he wasn't supposed to be at, when all of that was over you had to do it again the next year.

I was actually fucking glad I'd missed my prom. It seemed like a shit-load of worry for not much fun.

At least this time the outfit was Sookie's problem. The one year Tray had gone to a school ball all the tears had been shed by the guy at the suit hire place who kept insisting they didn't have anything that was going to fit him and wanted me, I think, to take him somewhere else.

"Oh" I said, in the end. Sookie seemed to want a response.

"I'm going to take her out to get a dress at the weekend."

"Can't she wear…?"

Sookie cut me off. "I don't think we can really hand down the ball dresses, Eric."

"Well, then tell the other girls to come and get their shit out of the closet then." It was all very well having a spare room these days, but it wasn't fucking storage for everyone else's shit. Not unless they were paying to rent the space.

"They have sentimental value" Sookie said.

"They're just dresses."

"With memories attached to them. Not everyone's like you and either wears things until they shred or bins them at the first opportunity." She went back to cleaning up the kitchen and I assumed the matter was closed.

When I got home from work that night though, things were still weird. Pam and Sookie were whispering to each other in the kitchen. "Hello" I tried, and Pam frowned at me. "Sorry. I don't want to stop the dress discussion."

"We're not talking about dresses" Pam said haughtily. Shit, it would be cramps then. I didn't need details.

Sookie was being distracted by Claude. "Get off me!" she said, as he clawed her leg for some attention. She picked the water pistol up off the counter and squirted him with it. He ran three steps, stopped, and turned back to go and sit almost on Sookie's foot again.

He was a persistent little fucker.

Sookie, meanwhile, was making significant gestures with her eyes towards me. I might have guessed this was coming. This was usually the part where they announced they'd found the 'perfect' dress but it 'only' cost $1000 and that was what 'everyone' paid these days and they'd wear that dress so many times and it would never, ever end up fucking sitting in a closet for years on end gathering dust. Yeah, my ass it wouldn't. I hated this part. I hated having to be the fucking bad guy and break their hearts.

Although…maybe I wouldn't? With Pam? She was the last one, after all. Maybe she deserved a nice dress?

Pam sighed, and gave Sookie a fucking filthy look. Probably because she just wanted her mother to hand over a credit card and not involve me.

I wondered if Pam would be willing to come and help out Diantha with the filing in exchange for dress money.

I wondered if she'd spill the beans to her sisters and I'd get a shit-load of grief from Amelia about the fact she'd been told she couldn't have a dress specially made by some fucking designer everyone was going to.

I wondered if she'd actually be fucking grateful to me, and not just shrug and pretend I wasn't there like Tray had after I'd had to fucking bribe that sales guy at the suit place into finding out where the Auckland Blues Rugby team got their suits from.

And while I was wondering all of this, I wasn't thinking about the alternatives. Although what came next was right out of fucking left-field. It wasn't a scenario I would have ever fucking contemplated.

"Dad" Pam said, and I almost pre-empted her and asked how much she fucking wanted. "Dad…I, um, well…" she looked at the floor. Sookie squirted Claude again. Claude didn't even move this time. She needed to put something more potent in that fucking water pistol.

Pam sighed again. "It's just…I'm going to the ball, with Sara. Because…I'm…"

Did I know Sara? Which one was Sara? All of Pam's friends looked the same. I wondered if Sara was likely to be getting some fucking expensive dress.

"I'm gay" Pam said in the end.

"Oh" I said. And then I turned around and left the kitchen.

**Thanks for reading!**


	68. Bonus 2: In the middle of the night

**A/N So big news, I have a job. An actual real, they pay me money and I have to turn up and drink their coffee in front of their computer kind of deal. So mostly I'll be there and the toddler will be charming some teachers at pre-school and the cat will be...not sure. Probably sleeping. So I have no idea what that'll do to my writing schedule, such as it is :(**

**Still, in other news one of my stories made it to the final 10 in the IWTS competition. Yay! That was exciting. So don't forget to vote while it's open, there's been some great entries this time around.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

I watched Eric's back as he left the kitchen and braced myself for what was coming next. Sure enough, Pam whirled around to face me. "Oh, well that went _well_" she said, sarcastically. "Now he hates me."

"He doesn't…" I said, but Pam cut me off.

"Yeah. He does. He just left! He didn't even say anything, which I guess is a relief because it would have really sucked to hear how much he hates me now!" Pam's eyes flashed in anger.

"He probably just needs time to, um…process?" I suggested. I wasn't sure at what point I'd turned into the Eric apologist in the family. Honestly, he was a pain in the bum. "He'll come back" I said. "He's never left for good yet."

Pam frowned. "He's done this before?"

"Um. Sometimes" I was wary of giving too much away. Claude decided to remind me that he was still waiting for his dinner and clawed my knee. I squirted him with the water pistol, but it didn't do much. He shook the water off his face and stood his ground.

I turned my attention back to Pam, who was still glaring at me. Well, I hadn't disappeared out the door.

"How far does he go?" Pam asked, like Eric was Ivan back in the days when Ivan still had the energy to dig himself out under the fence. Those days were long gone. I briefly entertained myself by imagining the fence big enough to keep Eric in and whether he'd try to dig himself out, or whether he'd simply just bribe the boys to dig for him. Were they too old to be interested in digging holes just to prove to Eric that they could? I didn't know, but I suspected Sam might be persuaded and Tray might join in just because Sam was doing it.

And then I snapped back to reality when Pam said "Well?"

"Um…oh, not far…I guess…" I mean there was the time he just sat in his car outside the old house, for one thing. "I didn't hear the front door. He's probably in the office."

Pam looked thoughtful. "Should I go in there?"

"Um…well. I'd wait for him to come out." Now it reminded me less of dealing with Ivan and more of dealing with Tray's weta Darth Vader, who wasn't even actually meant to be a pet. No way was I sticking my hand into the wardrobe to get him, no matter how much Tray wailed he wasn't inherently evil, he was just misunderstood.

Pam sighed and continued to look upset. I tried to shake Claude off my leg, but he'd attached his claws into the leg of my jeans and wasn't letting go. "Go away, Claude!" I said to him, but he didn't get the message.

Claude never got any of my messages. Claude was a big pain in the bum too.

Sam walked in then, and stopped as he tried to figure out what was going on and why Pam was standing there looking like thunder. And then Tray bounded in and Sam gave up. "Am I still making dinner?" he asked.

"Yep" I confirmed. "What are you making?"

"The chicken pie. The one with the chicken that you poach first and the mashed potatoes on top."

"You are so fucking g…" Tray declared, and then he stopped. "Homosexual" he tried.

"No. Just no. You are a fucking MORON!" Pam screamed at Tray, probably in lieu of screaming at Eric, and then she stomped out.

"What'd I do?" Tray asked. "I thought we weren't allowed to use gay?"

"Pam's right. You're pretty bloody thick" Sam told him, as he walked back into the kitchen from the laundry carrying the chicken breasts he'd pulled from the freezer.

"I don't know why everyone's so pissed off with me" Tray grumbled. "I didn't make the fucking rule."

"It's just a…a…well, it's pretty insulting to people who are" I tried.

"Are what?" Tray asked.

"Gay!" I replied. "If you say it like it's a bad thing, when it's just a thing. It's like saying that being blond is crappy because all blond people are stupid."

Tray looked at me in disbelief. "But everyone knows that's a bunch of arse!"

"Well, exactly." I tried to push Claude away from my leg with a foot. He decided the foot wasn't worth worrying about and went annoyingly limp. I wondered if Tray would be willing to let me borrow his foot.

"Mum thinks you're dumb" Sam said, just loud enough for Tray to hear him. "Shut up dickwad" he said to Sam. And then he frowned. "So why do we care about gay people?" he asked.

"Jesus fucking Christ" Sam muttered, putting the chicken in the microwave to defrost. I tried to disengage Claude from my leg.

No one had noticed Pam slip back into the kitchen. This had happened before, because she was quiet on her feet. Unlike some of the other members of the family. The first indication we had that she was there was the sound of her voice saying "Because I'm gay, dickface."

Tray looked at her, as did I, which gave Claude a perfect opportunity to try to sit on my foot again. Just in case I forgot he existed.

"Yeah" Tray said. "Funny."

"No, I am" Pam insisted.

"Yeah. Really fucking funny. How long does that take?" Tray's last remark was directed towards Sam. Sam shrugged.

"Will someone listen to me!" Pam yelled.

"What? I listened. I said you were funny. Move on, Pam." Tray made a sweeping gesture with his arm.

"Jesus, what do I have to do to get you to believe me? Bring my girlfriend home and make out in front of you?"

Tray's head slowly swivelled so he was actually looking at Pam. "Jesus Christ" he said. "You're gay, Sam acts gay. I must be fucking adopted."

I was about to break the bad news to him, when Pam launched in. "Why would that mean you're adopted?"

Tray shrugged. Pam glowered at him. Sam just kept watching the microwave. Claude gave my leg a swipe with his claws just in case I'd forgotten him.

"I like boobs as much as you do" Pam pointed out. "So I'm pretty sure we're related."

"So…huh" Tray mulled that one over. Pam turned her attention to Sam. "Want to point out I'm a freak you don't want to be related to?" she asked him.

"No" Sam said, trying to make himself smaller and less conspicuous.

"Soo…if you're a girl and you like boobs…" Tray began, still looking thoughtful. "Do you have any like, tricks?"

"What kind of tricks?" Pam asked, darkly.

"Like, you know. Tricks to get them to let you touch them. Or look at them." Tray shrugged. "Either's good."

"Dude!" Sam said, under his breath. I finally gave up on trying to distract Claude and went to get some cat biscuits from the pantry. There was only so much Claude I could take.

"Girls aren't objects, Tray" Pam admonished.

"I thought you said you like them?"

"Yeah! But not just like they're…don't you talk to them?" Pam asked Tray. Tray shrugged. "They talk to me" he said, enigmatically.

"God, I think _I'm_ adopted" Pam said. "You're just…I'm not even sure. Maybe your real parents dropped you on your head?"

"I'm pretty sure if anyone's adopted, it's actually me" Sam announced, while I put the biscuits down for Claude and he rewarded my behaviour with his most winning purr.

I tried not to be too offended by the fact they were all arguing over the possibility of not being related to me.

"I'm the only one here not having a fucking conversation about boobs" Sam said, as he started peeling potatoes and glared at his siblings.

Tray turned around to look at him. "Why would they adopt you? You're right in the middle."

"Exactly" Pam agreed. "So it's quite clearly me."

"No, you were the mistake" Tray informed her. It was probably a good thing he didn't know the truth about that one.

"I'm not a fucking mistake!" Pam fumed. "I'm just gay!" And then Eric walked back into the kitchen, no longer wearing his suit. He surveyed the assembled kids who all shut up, and the walked past them to the laundry.

Sam glanced at me, and I shrugged. Pam stared at the door to the laundry. Tray went back to his theory "No one really wants five kids" he told his sister. "So you were an oops. But that's OK, we still…like you. So do you know any tricks?"

Pam didn't answer him because Eric walked back out carrying Ivan's lead. "I'm taking Ivan out early tonight" he announced, looking at me and pointedly ignoring Pam. "He's no good in the cold these days." And then he left the kitchen, and Pam burst into tears before running off.

"Fuck" Tray muttered. "I mean, it wouldn't be _that_ bad being a mistake. We still like her." He shrugged. "And it's kinda nice to know the old man still had it in him."

Sam gave a very small shudder. I was tempted to point out that I may have been involved in Pam's conception too, but I didn't want to send Sam over the edge while he was holding something sharp, so that won out over not wanting Eric to get all the credit for everything around here.

"And you just want her around so you can pick her brains about the way to get girls?" Sam asked, watching me again. I busied myself poking the chicken he was defrosting. I just didn't want to think about it all right now.

I didn't know what to do about either of them.

Tray shrugged, and walked off and left Sam and I alone in the kitchen.

"He'll come round, won't he?" Sam asked, not taking his eyes off the potatoes.

"I can't speak for him" I said. If this was _Mastermind_, then my specialist subject wouldn't be Eric Northman. I had no idea how his thought processes went. They weren't like mine, I knew that much. I hoped he worked it out without causing too much damage to Pam…I hoped…well.

I was still keen on finding some kind of magic that would take me back in time. Or perhaps, with the ball coming up, Pam would get a fairy godmother?

Pam would eat a fairy godmother for breakfast. It was just going to be us, struggling through. Just like it always was.

"I think if I knew what went through your dad's mind" I said to Sam, "I'd spend half my life petrified."

Sam shrugged. "Or just be really desensitised to the word fuck."

"Too late."

EPOV

I just…fuck. Where did Pam get these fucking stupid ideas from?

She was so young; she was so…gay, apparently. It didn't seem right. It was fucking off somehow.

Perhaps if we just ignored her, she'd grow out of it? It had worked with Amelia when she'd decided to spend her time dressed entirely in black and spouting off about fuck knows what about nature and magic and all being tied to mother earth.

We'd ignored her, and eventually she'd stopped.

I figured the same thing would work with Pam.

It wasn't that I didn't love her, or that I wanted her to pretend to be someone else for my sake. I just didn't think she really knew what she was doing. So it was like dealing with Claude, ignore him, and eventually he'd give up. I just had to get Sookie to see that.

I took Ivan out and we shuffled very slowly down the street and back again, and when I got back, I sat in my office waiting for it to be dinner time. I wasn't hiding from Pam. I was…fuck. I was regrouping.

And that was allowed.

I could hear Tray walking around having the world's loudest and most annoying conversation in what sounded like a fucking foreign language. "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah…nah. Nah, not me, eh? Fuck it, it's so far out in the fucking wops. Yeah, total fucking tiki-tour to get there. And when we…yeah. Yeah, nah. Totally rooted. Yep. Fuckin' waste of space. Oh, nah. S'gonna take a least two hundy, eh? Prolly more like five all up. Might as well scrap it, it's only gonna suck the kumara in about a minute. Nah, not gonna bust a gut on something that dodgy. Yeah. Yeah, I had a squiz at that. Oh, munted mate. Utterly. Just from a prang with a fucking Remuera tractor. What? Yeah…nah. Maaate! You have no fucking idea. All it needs is some quick panel beating and a ton of bog, piece of piss really, but he won't fucking bother. He's just pissing around getting quotes. Nah. Sweet-as!"

It was possibly too late now to ask for a paternity test, but fuck. Where the fuck had Tray come from? He didn't even speak English half the fucking time which probably showed the extent to which enviroment won out over genes.

Maybe that was what had happened with Pam? Maybe if we hadn't sent her to that school, then she'd be OK? Maybe it was all those other students, the ones who had liberal fucking hippy parents who had convinced her that she was gay?

Tray started up again. "Yeah, bro, yeah, packed a total fucking sad over it. But I said I wasn't going to fucking shave, that's just a total waste of bloody time. She can fucking lump it. I'm not buying that wankery. Yeah, yeah. Bunch of fucking arse."

No, I was fairly sure my theory still stood up.

SPOV

Dinner was a fairly quiet affair, if you weren't Tray that is, who was regaling us with the story of his mate who refused to fix just 'a little fucking dent' in his car himself, even after Tray offered to help him and tell him how to do it.

Pam and Eric, however, were locked in a silent battle of who could ignore each other the longest. Honestly, I wasn't sure who would win that one; they were both as stubborn as each other. I could be on my death-bed and they'd still be passing messages to each other via Amelia.

Amelia would kind of love that.

But I didn't love it. I mostly hated it. I wasn't sure what was worse the screaming fights or this silence.

Maybe this.

Those of us who weren't Eric or Pam soldiered on and pretended it wasn't happening. Sam answered Eric's questions about the test for his tax paper, Tray expounded his theory on why shaving was for idiots and I, well, I just sat there and pretended Claude wasn't trying to climb on my lap so he could share my chicken pie.

Eric managed to make himself absent for the rest of the evening. He appeared briefly to hand me a cup of coffee and then he was gone again. I tried to talk to Pam but all I got was a terse "I don't want to talk about _him_" while she stroked Cordelia under the chin.

And they wondered why people stayed in the closet.

At bedtime Eric wasn't making a lot of eye-contact with me. I got the impression he was waiting for me to say something.

Well, it hadn't been my news to tell and it wasn't up to me to berate Eric for being an idiot about it. I hoped that he knew he was being an idiot and he'd stop being an idiot soon. In the meantime he could sit and stew.

OK, so there was a small possibility Pam might have inherited a tiny bit of stubbornness from me, but honest to God, I was pretty sure it was just that Eric drove me to it. If I didn't put up a bit of a fight he'd just bulldoze over me.

Eric obviously decided not to comment on my rather lurid looking romance novel and busied himself with his own boring book on the economic consequences of the war in the Middle East. A book combining money, politics and bloodshed ticked all the boxes for bedtime reading as far as Eric was concerned, and he was welcome to it. I turned off my light and lay down to go to sleep.

Bugger him.

EPOV

And now Sookie hated me too. This was hardly fair because I hadn't done anything. What the fuck was I meant to do? Congratulate Pam for choosing a life that was going to be harder than her siblings, that was going to give her a limited choice of partners, make her a target for bigotry?

Fuck, she'd had such an easy life she had no fucking clue what she was letting herself in for. I was still hoping that if we ignored it, she'd see that. She'd back down and realise it wasn't what she really wanted and I wouldn't have to have this fucking knot in my stomach worrying about what would happen to her, whether she'd be bullied, whether she'd ever find anyone who loved her, whether she'd regret all this when she didn't have any kids…fuck.

And now Sookie was fucking giving me dirty fucking looks too, for not rolling out the fucking rainbow carpet and celebrating Pam's venture into an unknown, fucking scary world.

No, I still thought I was right. I was right to ignore it and it would fucking go away. If Pam saw that not everyone greeted this news with a fucking ticker-tape parade and a group hug then she'd know what it was like. And she'd change back.

And she wouldn't fucking hate me anymore.

SPOV

Eric and Pam maintained radio silence and I gave up trying to not talk to Eric, although it was pretty clear neither of us was going to be the first to bring up Pam. I wanted to, though, I wanted to tell him he was being a total arsehole and breaking his daughter's heart. But it would only lead to an argument over something we couldn't change, and which he, quite clearly, was going to budge on.

I don't think I'd ever been as disappointed in him as I was over this.

Unfortunately we had plans to go out to dinner with Kennedy and Danny on Friday night, some teppanyaki restaurant in Herne Bay, which meant we'd end up spending the whole time ordering more and more of the little dishes as Eric struggled to find enough to eat and I missed out on everything because I wasn't quick enough to dig in when they brought it.

Still, it could be worse. We could have been taking Tray with us.

And we went out, and we had a nice time, but there was a distinct coolness between us. We didn't talk much in the car, and at the restaurant Eric talked mainly to Danny and I chatted to Kennedy, who, at the end of the night, pulled me aside. "Everything OK?" she asked. "You…seem a bit off?"

I sighed. I didn't really know what Eric's problem with Pam being gay was, and I wasn't sure how far the news was supposed to go. I couldn't really go into it with Kennedy. In the end I said "We're fine" and then I decided to change the subject.

"So, if you heard someone was called Thomo, would you assume they were Australian?"

"Oh. Totally" she agreed.

I knew I'd been right about that, but I didn't lord it over Eric. He was wrong about a lot of things, like he was wrong about the way he was handling Pam, and he'd have to figure it out for himself. Sometime. Hopefully.

EPOV

Everyone fucking hated me now. It really sucked being the fucking bad guy. Even Sam kept looking at me like I was fucking dirt. Felicia put something on her Facebook page about her little sister coming out 'despite the fact someone wanted to shut her in a closet all her life', and Pam and Sookie looked like they wanted to lynch me.

Amelia turned up and said "Oh, it's you" when I answered the door.

"I do fucking live here" I pointed out. She regarded me coolly. "I remember when you didn't" she said, and then she breezed past me into the house.

Fuck, really? I was getting my marching orders from fucking Amelia.

I went back into my office and looked at Aud sitting on my desk. "At least you don't have to worry about Claude" I said to her. "Because he is fucking gay, but I don't think cats discriminate on that basis, do they? On stupidity, yes, because none of you want to hang with fucking Edward, but sexuality, no."

I patted Aud's head. Maybe it would have been easier if Pam had been a cat?

SPOV

Amelia turned up and threw herself into the drama. "I can't believe he's being like that!" she said. "Well, I can, because, you know…he's so old-fashioned. I half-expect him to marry me off now I'm twenty-five."

I looked at Amelia. It was scary she was that old. And she looked like a grown-up now, too. All tailored and glossy, with just a hint of the old Amelia in the fact that she sometimes looked like a tailored and glossy forty year old.

Pam sighed, and nursed her coffee. We'd made it ourselves. That's how desperate things were. "I thought he'd love me anyway" she said.

"I know" Amelia said, consolingly, patting Pam's hand. "But we don't get to pick our parents."

"Gee, thanks" I said, and Amelia waved a hand dismissively. "Well, obviously _you're _alright" she said, condescendingly. "But he's just...oh, and before I forget, Felicia says can you stop him writing stuff all over her Facebook. Her friends are starting to think he's got some kind of early dementia."

I snorted. "Like that'd work. If I could stop him doing anything, I'd make this better." And then I stopped. I didn't want to bad-mouth Eric to his daughters. He'd kind of brought it on himself in this instance, though.

"And if that isn't bad enough, I have period cramps. Still!" Pam whined. "Everything in my life sucks."

"Mmm" Amelia said.

"It's not fair!"

"No" Amelia replied, soothingly. "It's not." She was quite good at this, I had to admit. I could maybe bow out of Pam's support team for a while and go and fold some washing.

But then Pam turned on Amelia, which took Amelia by surprise. "It's alright for you!" Pam spat out. "You can come here and tell me life isn't fair, but you got the better end of the stick! He's still talking to you! And you don't have to live here anyway! How come you get to fuck girls and no one bats an eyelid?"

Oh. Well. Amelia was batting her eyelids now in a fast and worried blink. "Pam…" she started.

"Well?" Pam asked. "Why don't we start labelling you, then? And telling you you're defective? Tell me, is that why he broke up with you? Is it? Didn't he like the comparisons?"

I just felt like I shouldn't be here for this. Way too much information for me. I was old, it wasn't right.

Pam stormed out of the room, leaving Amelia reeling. She took a deep breath, and composed herself. "It's not why Cameron broke up with me" she said, looking at her coffee cup on the table.

"But…it's true?" I asked. Wow, Amelia was grown up now. She was keeping stuff from me and everything. That felt kind of odd.

"About the girls?" I nodded. "Yeah" Amelia said, not sounding sure. "I mean…you know. I _experimented_. Doesn't everyone?" Well, not me.

She shrugged. "I just don't label it, I guess. It is what it is. I don't want an actual girlfriend…I mean, girls are bitchy. Pam's brave. I just…I dunno. I wanted to have some fun."

"And it was?" I asked, marvelling at the role reversal going on. Where was my little five year old who was horrified at the idea of how babies were made? What happened in the last twenty years that we got to the point of discussing how she'd slept with her own gender?

Amelia smiled. "Oh, yes!" she said. "Girls really know how to make it fun." And then stopped smiling. "Don't tell Dad though!" she said, hurriedly.

"I won't" I promised. I wished I could have added that if she wanted to tell him herself that it probably wouldn't make a difference, Eric would always love her. But I couldn't be that sure anymore.

If he could do this to Pam, what could he do to Amelia?

"Felicia says it's bad enough every time he sees a photo of a new guy on her Facebook. He's hounding her about that Thomo guy she works with."

"She's dating him?"

"Nope. He's too pasty and Australian for her tastes. I think they just like to go drinking together."

The conversation lapsed for a bit. "We broke up because I said no" Amelia said in the end.

"What? You and Cameron?"

"Uh-huh. He, uh…asked me to marry him" Amelia confessed.

"And you don't love him?"

"Oh, I do. Very much. But I don't want to get married. And I never, ever want kids. And he couldn't deal with that. I'd said it before…I'd said it _loads_, and I think he thought I'd change my mind. I'll never change my mind. Not about that." Amelia squared her shoulders and looked defiant, as though challenging me to disagree with her decision.

"Well, as long as you're happy" I said. It was all any mother wanted, after all. Although a tiny part of me worried, of course. Worried that she'd end up alone, and worried that I'd made her this way. Maybe if I hadn't kicked Bill out when she was little, maybe if I hadn't found Eric quite so soon afterwards, maybe if there hadn't been so many babies born when Amelia was a kid, she might feel differently.

Maybe if I'd been a better mother, a better role-model, a better person, she'd be happier?

I couldn't go back in time now though. We were all stuck on this path. Who would have known, 25 years earlier, when she was my bright new shiny baby that this was where we'd all end up?

You couldn't plan a damn thing in life.

I hoped Eric realised that. I hoped he wasn't thinking that Pam would change her mind and make it easier on him. Who knew if not being gay would have made her any happier? We didn't have a Pam control group to test that theory on. We just had to love the one we had.

"So, you won't be getting any grandkids from me" Amelia said, standing up to put her cup in the dishwasher. "You'll have to hope Tray forgets how babies are made and gets someone pregnant."

"Oh, God. Don't!" I warned. It didn't bear thinking about. "I'm not old enough to be a grandmother, anyway" I said to Amelia. It wasn't true, but I wanted to take the pressure off her.

Amelia gave me a sad smile. "No" she said. "But give it a couple of years when the others are out of the house and Dad'll need someone to play with."

EPOV

I couldn't even go within five feet of Pam now without feeling the coolness she was directing my way. She was permanently in a bad mood. Tray tried to help me out by announcing that "Pam's bitchy because she's all crampy again. Fuck I hate this part of the month!"

Yeah, one thing about Tray and Sam growing up with a bunch of girls, they tended to take periods in their stride. But I was pretty fucking sure her period wasn't the only reason. Mostly, she was upset because of me.

But I didn't really fucking know how to fix it. I was still convinced that eventually she'd come around and realise I was right, and that if she just looked at it from my point of view she'd understand. And I didn't think anything I said would make it right, until we got to that point.

So I just had to wait it out. Hunker down and pretend I wasn't living with the fucking enemy.

It was draining though. For the first time in a long time, I lay awake at night because I couldn't fucking sleep. I just…no. It would work out. And I'd be right. And I wouldn't say that I'd told them so, but they would fucking know. When Pam found out how shitty the world was and that really, I had loved her the best all along, she would fucking forget all of this ever happened.

And then I heard the footsteps. Tiny, delicate little footsteps creeping around the house. In the middle of night.

Well, it wasn't fucking Tray.

If she was sneaking out, I thought, or, even worse, fucking running away from home to live on the fucking streets with a bunch of drug-addicts and pedophiles, if she was doing that then I was totally and completely justified about locking her in her goddamned fucking room until she was twenty-one.

So I went out into the hallway and sprung Pam coming out of the bathroom. She didn't look like she was leaving. She was still in her pyjamas for one thing, and she looked a little fucking…green.

"Oh" she said. "It's you."

"Yeah, I will never understand the surprise you all feel about that. I live here. What's up?"

Pam sighed, and clutched her lower back. "Cramps" she whispered. "I just…they're so bad…I took some of the really stong painkillers, but they're still bad, and I'm getting this weird pain…like lower down…" she gestured between her legs.

I was about to go and get Sookie because fuck, this wasn't my area when Pam went really pale. And threw up on me.

"Oh, God" she said. "I don't know what's wrong!" And she burst into tears. I would have hugged her, but I was covered in vomit.

"What's going on?" Sookie's voice said, in a whisper. I don't know why. Nothing short of a fucking fog-horn woke Tray up.

"Pam's threw up on me."

"Oh" Sookie said. "Oh, yeah. That's going around. Judith had it from one of the kids at Jumping Beans, threw up for two days."

"No" I said, looking at Pam. "No, I think…"

"Come on" Sookie said to Pam. "Let's get you cleaned up." She went to lead Pam away, but Pam looked at me pleadingly.

"She's in pain" I pointed out.

"Well, I think that's standard" Sookie said. "The other end will probably be next. Let's head towards the loo."

"But she has been for days." They might have fucking shut me out but I did know that much, thanks to Tray's fucking big mouth.

"Cramps" Sookie said dismissively.

"But Mum" Pam said. "This really hurts. I've never had pain like this before." Her lip wobbled slightly. "And I'm sure it's not due yet. And it still hasn't come…" And then she threw up again, only Sookie jumped out of the way.

Well of course she did, she was expecting it now. I'd had no fucking warning.

I got no fucking warning about anything around here.

"I just…I don't know…" Sookie said, looking from me to Pam and back again. "Do you think it's something else?"

I shrugged. I was not a doctor. But this seemed wrong, somehow.

"Daddy" Pam said, desperately. "Daddy I don't feel very good at all."

"Hospital" I said to Sookie. "You clean her up, I'll change and then we'll go."

Sookie looked for a moment like she might fight me on it, because after all, cramps were her fucking specialty. But one look at Pam told me this wasn't just cramps. She was pale and sweaty and looked like fucking death.

In the end, after a moment of regarding each other over Pam's head, Sookie nodded and I left them heading towards the bathroom. Fuck. I was going to miss this t-shirt.

But not as much as I'd been missing Pam. Fuck, if I thought the gay thing was scary, this was worse.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

**Thanks for reading!**


	69. Bonus 2: Hospitals are no fun

**A/N Yeah, this was a mission. Working is not conducive to mucking about with fanfiction, the kids have been sick, the laptop got unexpectedly replaced and I'm having to learn a new keyboard - it was a tough ride to get this chapter done.**

**BUT**** in the good news column, my story Trigger Happy won the judges' first place in the 2012 IWTS contest! I was so excited. Last thing I won was a body-building competition. This was way easier and required less bronze body-paint, and I didn't have to give up junk food. Awesome!**

**So thank you to everyone involved in the contest, and to the readers for making it a huge success for another year!**

**Disclaimer: Funnily enough, they weren't my prize. Go figure.**

SPOV

The car ride to the hospital was tense. Pam was still clutching at her lower back and looking pale and sweaty. In case she was hit with another wave of nausea, I'd kitted her out with a plastic ice cream container and I could see how hard she was gripping it as each wave of pain hit her.

I felt awful. She really was sick. I'd been thinking it was cramps mixed with a large dose of being pissed off at Eric and hadn't really considered other alternatives. More serious ones.

And there was a tiny...really tiny part of me that was extremely pissed off because all along I'd been thinking I was the great parent out of the two of us, buoyed along by Amelia telling me what an arse he was being about Pam's coming out. I was gutted that it might not be the case and he'd been the one to actually help the sick child in our care.

Luckily, I was the person who remembered how old Pam was now. "She's 16, so it has to be the main A&E, not the one at Starship" I said to Eric, as we were waiting at a completely empty intersection for the light to change green. At least, I hoped we were. Eric was looking from left to right and back again, and frowning. I wasn't sure that 'my daughter is sick' was a valid reason for running a red light.

"If I knew what A and E was, Sookie, that might help me."

"Um…" Sadly my translator didn't work so well in the early hours of the morning. "Um…ER?"

"OK. ER" Eric confirmed, as the light changed to green and he turned the car into Grafton Road. "But not at the Starship?"

"It's not _the_ Starship, it's just Starship."

"Why couldn't it just be called a fucking hospital, Sookie? That's what I would like to know."

I glanced back at Pam, who was leaning against the car door. She didn't look great. "So it won't scare the kids" I explained to Eric. "The word hospital is scary."

"Only when they send you the fucking bill" Eric muttered, as we turned into the hospital and drove down past Starship to the carpark. I didn't have the heart to tell him this was going to be free, it seemed like that might be the thing that pushed Eric over the edge, and I was pretty sure that Pam was going to appreciate not having to hear Eric outline his thoughts on the allocation of the tax money he paid towards other people's medical expenses. We had heard that one before.

And then we had to trek from the carpark to the A&E department. It wasn't the best design. I realised that if I'd thought about it, I could have probably had Eric drop us off at the door and then park the car, but there was always the chance that Pam wouldn't want to go in without Eric. All of a sudden, he seemed to be the favourite again.

Well, it could have been that she just needed someone to lean on and was worried that I might, in my completely sleep-deprived state, have just keeled over with her, except that it had always been that way. By the time you get to kid number five you think nothing can surprise you anymore, and yet I'd been flummoxed every time I'd gone to Pam in the night, when she was sick or just grumpy and wanting attention, and she'd pushed me away and yelled for Daddy. She might have stopped calling him Mummy, but she hadn't got over the fact he was still her number one choice in moments of personal crisis.

I was quite clearly just there to make up the numbers. I felt a bit like that at the hospital, too. As we walked into the waiting area a nurse took one look at the now incredibly pale Pam clutching her ice cream container and announced cheerily "Every picture tells a story!" before she showed us to a curtained off cubicle in a corridor.

Eric lifted Pam up onto the bed and she lay there, with her eyes shut and a weird grimace on her face. "Just give her details at the desk" the nurse said, and then she left. I looked at Eric who was staring intently at Pam with his lips pressed together and figured out pretty quickly what I was here for. Well, someone had to handle the administrative details and it might as well be the person who remembered this daughter still had her tonsils but had once broken her wrist.

When I saw the rest of the waiting room I was especially glad we'd skipped this part. All the drunks in Auckland seemed to be hanging out there, shouting at each other and trying to stop whatever wound they'd ended up with from bleeding too much. It wasn't exactly a happy place.

Neither was Pam's cubicle when I got back to it, however. Well, Pam seemed OK. Pam had pretty much passed out. Eric, on the other hand, was pacing. "Where the fuck are the doctors?" he asked me.

I shrugged. I didn't know. I had a feeling some of them might have been involved in breaking up the fight by the coffee machine in the waiting area. I considered whether to suggest to Eric that he let some of them tag him in for that so they could look at Pam, but I didn't think he was in the mood for that kind of suggestion.

Instead I sat down on one of the hard, vinyl covered chairs that were next to the bed. "I guess they'll be here soon" I said.

"What the fuck is your definition of soon, Sookie?"

"Soon." I was too tired to get worked up as well. Eric seemed to be doing well enough at that for the both of us. Still, in a way it was nice to see him noticing Pam existed, even if he was just hovering over her prone body as though he could figure out what was wrong if he just tried hard enough.

I was half-surprised he wasn't Googling it.

So we sat there, Pam dozing on and off, and occasionally asking what was happening, Eric fretting over where the doctors were, and me trying not to doze off. At one point Eric went on a search for coffee and Pam briefly came around, but only really wanted to know where Daddy was. Not much had changed then.

A nurse showed up and took Pam's temperature, asked a few questions while Eric asked her how long until a doctor came. "Soon" she told him. Well, I'd known that one, but no one listens to me.

And then a doctor did show up. Boy, you heard about doctors getting younger but I would have sworn this girl was younger than Amelia. That was…really, really weird.

"I'm Dr Skinner" she said to us both. Eric just stared at her. I don't think he was buying it.

The doctor gave up on Eric and turned to me. "So…abdominal pain?" she asked me, looking at the chart she was holding.

"Um…I guess. Pam said they were like cramps."

"She's in a lot of pain. I think it's her appendix" Eric announced. OK, so maybe while I'd been resting my eyes briefly he had been checking Google. That figured.

"Hmm" said the doctor, as she sized up Eric. Probably wondering what his medical credentials were. I didn't think 'has access to the internet' really counted. Even with someone who looked about 18.

"Pam" she said, leaning over the bed and Pam's prone form. "Pam." Yeah, she was always the hardest kid to wake up when she was exhausted.

Pam stirred, and she opened her eyes. "Pam, I need you to tell me where it hurts."

"Here" Pam whispered, clutching at her right side again. "It's in the back, kind of crampy. I thought it was cramps. And it hurts…kind of, like, um…in my vagina…a bit…but not as much there…"

"Uh-huh" Dr Skinner said, again. "I'm just going to examine you."

I glanced over at Eric who, I think, wasn't sure whether to be more worried about the vagina comment or the fact the doctor might not be qualified. Dr Skinner pressed around on Pam's abdomen. "That sore?" she asked.

"Not really" Pam said. "It just hurts. All the time. In waves."

The doctor pressed her lips together and looked thoughtful. "I'll be back in a moment" she said, and then she left the cubicle, pulling the curtains closed behind her.

"She's probably just gone to look it up" Eric announced. "But it's pretty fucking obvious if you ask me. Pain on the right side, it has to be appendix."

"I don't know. I had my appendix out, I wasn't in that much pain" I said. I shrugged. "I guess it was just a grumbling appendix though."

Eric shook his head. "They make these fucking terms up, Sookie" he said. "Nothing actually grumbles."

Well, only Eric. But I didn't need a doctor to diagnose that one.

"She better fucking come back" Eric said.

"She will."

Eric paced a bit more. "This is fucking subsidised health care for you."

"Really? It's so much better when you get hit with a bill at the end of it?"

That shut him up for about five minutes. "You know, maybe I should go and find someone…" he said, but he trailed off as Dr Skinner reappeared.

"Can you please step out of the room?" she asked me and Eric. Eric looked like he might protest, but after I stood up and started moving towards the curtain, he followed me.

"What on earth are we out here for?" Eric asked, and I tried to figure out what to say. Luckily it didn't come to that. A curtain only affords an illusion of privacy, after all.

"Pam" Dr Skinner said. "Pam" she said again, louder this time. I heard Pam say something in response.

"Have you had sex recently?" Dr Skinner asked, and Pam didn't respond. Maybe she shook her head for no. We could hope. Eric started to look disturbed.

"Have you ever had sex?" Dr Skinner asked Pam.

"Not with a penis" Pam said.

Eric stopped looking disturbed, and started to look distraught. "Um…I could do with some tea" I suggested, and with a final look back at the curtain, Eric headed off down the corridor towards the waiting area again.

EPOV

This was a fucking long night. A fucking long, boring, distressing night. Pam was in pain and no one was doing a fucking thing about it. That doctor, who was quite possibly just a medical student doing some kind of rotation, didn't have a fucking clue what was going on. I couldn't understand why they wanted to discount her appendix, when it was pretty fucking clear that's what it was. Pain in the right side was a fairly clear indicator as far as I was concerned, and I didn't think you really even needed Google to tell you that.

If her appendix burst while it was still in there, I was going to sue. I didn't care what they said here, I could fucking sue someone if my kid died.

I went to find Sookie some tea. She'd probably had enough of the shitty coffee they had here. I had too, and yet I needed something to take the edge off. I was just…fuck this was awful.

I put coins in the machine and waited until it spat out something lukewarm and brown for Sookie. I could remember so clearly the day Pam had been born, somewhere upstairs from here. I'd been so worried that Sookie might die, might leave me with Pam.

And now we were all back here, and I was worried that it might be Pam this time. Why was everything so fucking shitty?

When I got back to the cubicle which was completely not sound-proofed, Sookie was back inside with Pam and the doctor was nowhere to be seen, again. I handed Sookie her tea.

"She's coming back" Sookie said to me. I figured she meant the doctor, if you could really call her that.

"Is she bringing back someone in charge?" I asked.

Sookie shrugged. Fuck, I wished I'd been there with them, and I could have insisted.

"She'll be OK" Sookie said. "They're doing what they can for her, after all."

"I know" I said. I fucking didn't know, but I had to believe that they were.

Sookie reached over and rubbed my arm. "It'll be OK" she said.

It was nice that she cared, that she had actually fucking registered that I was worried about Pam, but I didn't understand why she hadn't been like this the day before. I'd been worried about Pam since she'd announced she was fucking gay, and no one gave me any comfort for that, after all.

I didn't say anything; I just sat down on the chair next to Sookie. All we could do was wait. It was a fucking disaster. I couldn't make it better, couldn't control anything, it was horrible. I fucking hated hospitals.

"Daddy?" Pam said, quietly, and I reached out and took her hand. "Daddy, it still hurts" she said.

"I know, Pammie" I said to her.

"I want it to stop hurting." She burst into tears.

"This is ridiculous" I said to Sookie. "They have to do something about this pain." I considered going to find that doctor again, or even a nurse, but Pam was holding my hand in a death-grip and I didn't think I was going anywhere in a hurry.

"You're still the favourite" Sookie mused. "When she's not well. She always did want you."

"She wanted you too."

"Mmm. I don't think you ever had to deal with the hysterical two year old with the ear infection who threw Mr Fluffy at me because I didn't immediately produce you when she got up from her nap."

There wasn't much I could fucking do about that retrospectively. I hoped though, that when all of this was over, Pam would see that I really was on her fucking side, that I'd always been on her side, and that I just didn't want her to fuck up her life when she was only 16.

"I guess this puts it in perspective" Sookie said, and then she looked sideways at me, and sipped her tea.

It did, in a way. I knew I loved Pam. I'd always loved Pam. I wanted the best for Pam. And sometimes she needed me to take care of her.

I wasn't sure if it made the gay thing any better. What would be the point of getting through a burst appendix if you ended up miserable anyway?

"I love her" I said to Sookie.

"I never doubted that."

"Well everyone's been treating me like a fucking pariah. You might as well have accused me of that as well as everything else."

Sookie sighed. "I don't think anyone accused you of anything. You, uh…well…" she trailed off. She didn't say anything for a while. I thought she might have dozed off again.

"You didn't really support her" Sookie said in the end.

"I don't think she needs my fucking support. She's made her choice either way."

"I don't think it's a choice, Eric. I think she's always been this way. Doesn't it make sense to you?"

I shrugged, with the shoulder that wasn't attached to the hand that Pam was still clutching, while she snored loudly on her back. I didn't know if it did make sense. To me, it seemed like the fucking opposite, it made no sense. Why go down a path that was likely to lead to you being on the outskirts of society? I just couldn't understand it.

"Not everyone is you, Eric" Sookie said. "Although I guess I can tell Pam is yours."

"I've never thrown Mr Fluffy at you, Sookie."

"Well, I was thinking more about the fact that Pam liked boobs too, but I guess the stubbornness is kind of telling."

I wasn't sure what was more disturbing about that sentence, the idea of Pam ogling breasts, or the fact that Sookie really thought Pam's stubborn moments were inherited from me.

"I just…I don't get any of it…" I said to Sookie.

"That doesn't make it bad, though."

"Of course it does. If I don't get it, and I love her, then…well, let's face it. They're a minority for a fucking reason. Why sign up to that?"

Sookie sighed. "I think the point of being a minority is that you don't get a choice. And I think the point of you loving her is that you accept her the way she arrived."

"Did she though? Did she arrive like this?" I tried to remember the tiny bundle they'd handed me when they'd wheeled Sookie out of the delivery room. She was just a minute parcel of bones and skin and I was so fucking scared that she was going to be all my responsibility and I'd fuck her up.

"I guess that's what you have to decide" Sookie said.

I thought about it. She'd always been…not exactly bossy, like Amelia had been. Pam didn't shout or scream that much. Pam just got on with what she wanted to do. I thought about all the tea-parties and glitter creations and endless Barbie movies I'd lived through. I hadn't had a fucking clue was what coming.

But then I'd never thought Felicia would move in with that fucking Rubio, either. Or run off to fucking London. They all liked to do stuff that made my life fucking difficult. Was Pam any different to her siblings? Was she any different to how she'd been as a little girl shuffling around in plastic high-heels and a tiara?

"She's always Pam" I said.

"I think that's your answer to it all" Sookie said. I was glad she was so fucking sure, because I wasn't.

"I just wish she didn't have to go through…anything bad…" I said. I didn't want to list the bad things that might happen. I wasn't sure I actually knew, but no one said being a minority was a fucking picnic, and there had to be a reason for that.

"Well, bad stuff happens, but we'll be there for her. Although next time, it might be nicer if it's not the middle of the night." Sookie smiled at me, and I tried to smile back, but I really didn't feel like it just at that fucking point in time.

Fuck, this sucked.

"I don't want to pick up the pieces" I said. "I want to stop it all happening."

"Of course you do" Sookie agreed. "But that wasn't in the job description."

"There was a fucking job description? Fuck, you never said that when I arrived."

Sookie shrugged. "I think Amelia used yours to make paper dolls with. Anyway, the point is that we knew we were never signing up for an easy ride."

"Felicia ate a fucking shoe."

"No, you thought Felicia ate a shoe. That lesson wasn't about watching what the baby ate, that lesson was about not believing all the dramatic statements the three year old makes when she's annoyed with the baby."

I thought for a moment. "So what's this fucking lesson then?"

Sookie looked at her watch. "At 3am I am off-duty. You need to figure it out."

"Are you this fucking Zen with the kids?"

"Oh, God no. Not with all of them. If I left Tray to figure it all out for himself he'd be screwed. You have to tell him exactly what he's doing, and why he's doing it, and even then he gets all annoyed about it."

"Yes, well he is related to you Sookie." She gave me a look which suggested she wasn't buying that one.

"I might have a break" Sookie announced, and I wondered where she was going, but all she did was put her cup on the nightstand and then rest her head on my shoulder.

I thought about it. I didn't know if there was a lesson from this, from Pam being sick and in pain. It just sucked. So did most of being a parent though.

And I guessed your daughter announcing she was gay was just par for the fucking course.

"What if she wants kids?" I said to Sookie.

"Mmm, she can. If she really wants, but she's got a long time to decide."

"I'll never get to walk her down the aisle."

"You might. There's nothing to stop her committing to someone."

"I just…it feels like she's going to miss out…"

Sookie sat up. "I can't see how. She's going to the ball for one thing."

"With a girl."

"Because she likes girls. Sam went with a girl."

"Who promptly dumped him at some fucking drunken-orgy of an after-party, if I remember correctly. He didn't come out of his room for three fucking days."

"I never did like Callie" Sookie announced. That was fucking true. She'd covered it up well, though. Mostly.

"But you put up with it?"

"His choice. Not much I could do about it."

"You wouldn't let her take Claude."

"Sometimes I regret that" Sookie said, sighing.

"I don't want to lose Pam" I said to her.

Sookie looked at me. "I don't think that's going to happen."

"But she hates me now" I said.

Sookie nodded at the hand I was still holding. "I don't think that's hate."

"I just want her to be happy."

Sookie looked at me, and if she was ever going to say anything in response to that, I'll never know, because Dr Skinner walked back into the cubicle. "I've consulted with a colleague" she announced. Thank fuck for that because I really think they needed to open Pam up and remove that appendix. Now.

"We think we know what the problem is, and we'll have to run an x-ray in the morning to confirm."

"How soon before the surgery?" I asked.

Dr Skinner frowned. "Oh. No. Well, we don't know at this stage. But we think it's a kidney stone."

Well, fuck. Why was it never anything I fucking expected?

"Huh" Sookie said. "None of the kids have ever had one of those before."

I looked at her. What the fuck did we know about kidney stones?

What the fuck we did know about lesbians either?

"Is that normal? For a sixteen year old?" I asked the doctor. She shrugged, which didn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in her diagnosis. "Happens to all sorts of people" she said.

"Daddy" Pam said. "Daddy, when will it stop hurting?"

"I'll get her some pain relief for now, and we have to wait until Radiology opens at 8am" Dr Skinner said. "I'll see if I can get her a room." She left through the curtain.

"Soon" I said to Pam.

"Daddy…daddy…" Pam didn't say anything, she just sobbed quietly. "It's OK" I said. "They think it's a kidney stone, which, I think, they can fix."

Pam looked at me. "Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yes" I said. I wished I'd been able to check Google first, but I was pretty sure it wasn't immediately life-threatening.

"You promise?" Pam asked, and all of sudden she looked like the little girl I'd promised so much to; trips to the store of her choice, cardboard swords, a fucking fairy for her birthday party.

"Yes" I said. "I promise."

"OK" Pam said, and then she closed her eyes. A minute or so later she was snoring again.

Sookie was right. She was still Pam. And she trusted me, she trusted me not to break her heart, like she'd had to trust me not to abandon her on that fucking awful day in the delivery room.

"I love you" I said to her, but all I got was a snore in response.

"I think it'll be…" I said to Sookie, but it was no use. She'd dozed off too, leaning against the wall, but still sitting mostly upright.

Well it was perfectly clear that some things Pam had inherited from Sookie, even if she had, supposedly, got her interest in boobs from me.

**Thanks for reading!**


	70. Bonus 2: It's worse for the patient

**A/N Hello to everyone still out there! This got to you despite the time-suck that is work and sick kids, and a sick me. Plus my cat is now convinced the laptop mouse is his, and keeps trying to carry it off. Oh, it's been fun all round.**

**But this is something a little different, it's all in Pam's point of view.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

PPOV

I woke up and I had no freaking idea where I was for a moment. Someone was talking to me, though.

"Pamela, we're just taking you down to radiology now."

Well I wasn't at home, then. And I felt really disgusting. Not as sore anymore, at least, I had the feeling the worst of the pain had stopped. But I felt like I'd been run over.

"Where's my dad?" I asked the person pushing my bed around.

"Your parents went home, they'll be back soon" she said. Well, that was nice for them, wasn't it? Going home and leaving me here while a bunch of doctors did God knows what to me.

I didn't want to be here alone. I wasn't really used to it. There was _always_ someone around when I was at home; I couldn't remember ever really being by myself.

I wondered if Dad was coming back. Ever.

Probably not. He came last night because Mum made him, I think, and now he didn't want to know me again. He'd never want to know me again, and it just wasn't fair because there wasn't anything I could do about it. I didn't want to be like Amelia and spend the rest of my life paying out to keep everyone quiet about who I was dating…I just…it wasn't FAIR.

I didn't really notice that a tear was running down my face until the nurse, or whoever, said "It'll be OK. We just have to put some iodine through you to see if there's something in your kidneys."

Oh great. Yay. What I really wanted was a tissue before I ended up with snot all over my face.

"Will it hurt?" I asked the nurse.

"Um…well…not too much" she said, and then they parked my trolley in a corridor and left me there. She wasn't very convincing, and now I was here all by myself. I wondered what would happen if I just walked off. Would they notice? Would my family notice if I never came from the hospital? Would Dad be happy that he didn't have to be confronted with the fact that I was never going to be the little girl he thought I was?

My life really sucked. And the fact that I was stuck here, in hospital, abandoned in a corridor, really summed it all up.

I bet they wouldn't have done this if Dad was here. Everyone was scared of Dad…well, not everyone. Mum wasn't. Mum rolled her eyes when he mentioned suing people, but everyone else thought he was a little bit dangerous and not to be trusted.

And everyone knows that Americans like to sue people. It's just a fact.

So quite frankly, things were sucky all around.

I closed my eyes and dozed for a bit, and then the nurse turned up again and woke me up. "They're ready for you" she said, brightly, like it was a brilliant thing that was about to happen. Yeah, I didn't think so.

"I don't like needles" I said, as they wheeled me into a big room with a really horrible looking machine in it.

"Um…OK" the nurse said, not at all in a comforting way. I got the feeling even Tray would be more comforting than this woman.

"So…um…"she glanced at the chart attached to my bed. "Pamela…"

"Pam."

"Right. We're just going to put this iodine into your arm and…"

"I don't want to" I said.

"Oh, the iodine is perfectly safe. You might get a little bit of an allergic reaction, but that's very rare."

"No, I don't want the needle."

"You have to have the needle, Pamela." Now she sounded exasperated. Really, I don't think she should have been a nurse at all. She wasn't cut out for looking after people. "It won't hurt at all."

And then she stuck it into my arm. "Ow!"

"See, it wasn't that bad" the nurse said brightly.

"How do you know?" It wasn't her arm.

She gave me a look, and I recognised that look. It was the 'you're just a grumpy teenager' look. I got it at home all the time. It sucked being the youngest, nothing I did seemed to be any surprise to anyone, and it all got lumped in with the whole 'you'll grow out of it and get a nice job and move out of home and we'll talk fondly about you like you're dead, like we do with Amelia' feeling.

Except…I was the only one who'd said I was gay. And look where that had got me. Stuck here, by myself, totally abandoned by my parents.

I'd run away from home, but they'd probably not really care, and I didn't want to give up my room because it was kind of nice. Plus who would look after Stan and Cordelia if I wasn't there?

No, I was stuck with them, and they were stuck with me and none of us were happy about it, and they probably should have stopped having kids after having Tray. Bet they really regretted that I was the mistake now.

They put me in that machine, and took a whole bunch of x-rays. And then, after a while, they remembered to wheel me back to my room.

Mum was there. No Dad though.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Like shit" I told her. No point in trying to make it better than it was.

Mum leaned over and started plumping my pillows, like that would make it all better. "Do you want some water?" she asked.

"Not really. Apparently when I next pee, it'll be like a fluorescent yellow colour. They pumped me full of this weird crap so they could see my kidneys. I feel like a lab-rat."

"Mmm. We had to sign the consent for that before we left. But at least this way they'll know."

"Was that when Dad was muttering about lawyers?"

Mum sighed. "He gets funny ideas. I didn't realise you were awake for that part."

I shrugged. "I dozed a lot. I remember some of the things…Dad didn't like the coffee and thought the doctor was too young."

"Well, Dad likes to voice his concerns. I think it makes him feel better."

I thought for a bit. "He was pissed off he had to be here."

"He was worried about you."

"He was pissed off because it was the middle of the night and he was in a hospital. He hates hospitals. He said that, last night. He said that a lot."

"Well…I think that has to do with the time I scared him in one, which wasn't anything to do with you."

"Yeah, except that he was _stuck_ with me. He said that too."

"I think that was just a general rant. He does that, about the scary stuff."

"Yeah, right" I said. Mum had it wrong, it was pretty obvious that Dad had been pissed off with the fact I'd been born and he was really pissed off with me now because I was sick, and gay, and fine then! We'd just be shitty with each other.

"Tell him not to come in" I said. "I don't want to see him."

Mum frowned, which was annoying. I wanted to yell 'don't judge me, you're not gay'. I wondered if I could. But it was always tricky with Mum, if you started saying she was lucky she didn't have to go through something with her parents, she got all sad because they'd died. And that took the focus right off whatever your point had been in the beginning.

I didn't really want to be annoyed at my mother for being an orphan, but, really, it did give her free rein to just do whatever she liked without ever having to admit that she had a better time of it when she was growing up.

And Dad was worse. He might as well have been an orphan. I vaguely remembered meeting his mother once, in the States, but he'd never spoken about her since. Maybe she is dead?

"What?" I asked Mum. "He hasn't come in here to hold my hand or anything."

"He had an appointment. He was here last night."

"Like he had a choice."

Mum pursed her lips. "I think at the time it was what you both wanted."

I didn't really remember that much about the night before. It was all just images and moments, and mostly all I could remember the little rants Dad was having because he was pissed off. Oh, and the lovely bit when they questioned me all about what sex I'd been having. The joy of that was overwhelming. I could understand why Dad got so pissed off, he'd had to face up to the fact I didn't like boys once again.

He probably thought this was poetic justice.

"I brought you some clean pjs" Mum said. "Do you want to get into them?"

I sighed, and shrugged. "I guess" I said, so I managed to get off the bed and get changed, with Mum's help. I hated being a stupid patient.

"Are you still sore?" Mum asked, as I climbed back in.

"Yeah" I said. Dumb question really.

"Well, they'll figure out what to do soon" Mum said brightly. She was annoying like that. If Dad had been here he would have been pestering them to come and tell us what was happening…but Dad wasn't coming.

"Did you bring my phone?" I asked Mum.

"Oh" she said. "No. I'll bring it up later on."

I didn't say anything. I figured that made it pretty clear that Dad wasn't actually coming in if Mum was doing all the visiting. Fine. He could go and take a flying jump then. I didn't need him anyway.

We sat there for a while, and Mum kept trying to make conversation, but I didn't really want to. I was pretty tired for one thing.

Eventually I must have dozed off for a bit, and I remembered Mum kissing me and saying she'd be back later. Yeah, whatever. Guess I should get used to it because when I moved out of home I'd probably get lots of visits from Mum checking I was OK, and none from Dad.

Well, that was fine.

When I woke up, I was really sore. I pushed the buzzer and after a while a nurse popped her head around the curtain. "We're just doing changeover, so I'll be back in a minute" she said, when I told her I was hurting.

And then she left.

I listened to the snoring coming from someone else in the room, someone I couldn't see because of the curtains. Was that even a woman? It sounded worse than Tray did after he'd done that pub-crawl and Dad had had to throw him in the shower and rinse him off, clothes and all. Dad had been less than impressed with Tray that night.

And yet, still, in the morning, all Tray had got was a lecture on not being a fucking idiotic drunk. I hadn't done anything half as bad as that, and I still got the shitty end of the stick.

And no one was bringing me the paracetamol they'd promised. I might as well be invisible.

They did bring me some lunch. It was awful, this weird thin soup and a bread roll. Hospital food sucked. They finally doled out some painkillers but they didn't do anything. It was hopeless.

I wondered how bad you had to be to get the good drugs.

I was lying there, staring at the curtain, and I heard them coming before they got there. It was hard not to. Tray's really loud.

"There you are" Tray said, as he pushed the curtain open and sat down on the bed. Heavily. He's really big. Bigger even than Dad, which makes him really stand out in a crowd. There wasn't much room left in the little cubicle now, but Sam managed to squeeze in.

"Whatcha get for lunch?" Tray asked, looking over at the tray of food that was still sitting on the table beside my bed.

"Crap" I said. "Have you got Subway?"

Tray took a bite of his and nodded. Sam handed over a bag. "I managed to stop him eating yours, although his will give him a fucking stomach-ache."

"There's nothing wrong with my steak and cheese" Tray said.

"Yeah, except you added mayo, sweet chilli sauce, _and_ fucking barbecue sauce to it. That's just gross."

"You're just a snob."

"No, I have fucking taste buds." Sam handed me a bag with a sub in it. "It's ham" he said.

"Thanks" I said. I tried to sit up a bit straighter, but Tray had my leg pinned to the bed. "Move, dickhead" I said to him, and he shuffled over a bit.

"Jeez, they didn't give you a personality transplant, did they?"

"Shut up." I unwrapped my roll and took a bite. It was OK.

"Was the soup nice?" Tray asked.

"No" I said to him.

We were all silent for a while. "Oh. Mum said you wanted your phone" Sam said, and he handed it over.

"Ta." I switched it on and waited. "Leesh sent me a text" I said to them. "She says _Get well soon Pom-Pom. I'll have a drink to your good health! _And she sent a photo…what a bitch! I don't want to see how much fun she's having on holiday." Ibiza looked fantastic. Why wasn't I there, and not here?

"Meh. Long way to go" Tray said, crumpling up the paper his Subway had been wrapped in.

"From here. Not from London" I pointed out. Maybe I should run away to London and hang out with Felicia? She wouldn't mind if I crashed with her for a while.

"It's just a bunch of people getting drunk and trying to hook up" Sam announced.

"Yeah. 'Cos you _never_ do that shit" Tray said, scathingly.

"Fuck off."

"You fuck off. Just because you think you have to find some magical fucking vagina…"

"Shhh!" I warned Tray. I didn't know who exactly was on the other side of that curtain. Snoring woman probably didn't want to know about vaginas.

"What? You _like_ vaginas, remember?" Tray said.

"I also have a vagina. And there's more to me than that."

"Euw! Pam! You're my sister!"

"Well, you might be talking shit about someone else's sister" Sam pointed out.

"Dude. You over-think it. Just…go with the flow, mate. Let the chicks come to you."

Sam pulled a face. "What are you? The fucking love-guru?"

"Bro, I'm on your side, remember? Don't worry. I'll take you to the Uni Club one night. Hook you up." Sam pulled another face. "Hey, don't diss the engineering chicks. They're pleasingly slutty."

"You're annoyingly slutty" Sam said.

Tray shrugged. "I'm just popular, I can't help that."

"So, what? This popularity is supposed to rub off on me?"

"Well, I'll help you out. I'm promoting myself from wing-man to squadron leader."

"I don't think you can promote yourself" Sam muttered under his breath. He folded his arms and frowned. I wondered if they'd forgotten I was here. Still, it was mildly more entertaining than staring a curtain and counting someone else's snores.

"Course I can. Pam'll come. It's the holidays; you can have a night out, eh Pam?" Tray swivelled around to look at me. They actually wanted me to come with them? That was weird.

Then I thought about it.

"Do you just want to parade me around as your sick little sister to get sympathy? I'm not shaving my head and pretending to have cancer."

"Oh. No. Fucking good idea, though. But, nah. I thought you'd like to come…you know. Hang out…um, meet chicks?" Tray trailed off. Sam gave me, what I thought was, maybe, an encouraging look.

Huh. So one of the perks of being gay was that I finally got treated like an honorary bloke by my brothers. They'd _never_ done that before. Not even when we were kids. I always had to be Princess Leia, and they wouldn't even let me have a blaster like she had in the movies. Once they even said the couch was Jabba the Hutt and tied me to it. Mum was pretty mad at them when she found me and Dad muttered a lot about them being little shits.

I'd liked it when Dad was on my side. Only now he wasn't. I didn't think I'd be an honorary bloke to him, or guy, or whatever. I was just a defective daughter.

"I could come" I said. "But Sam'll have to pull that stick out of his bum before anyone will look twice at him."

"Shut up" Sam said, and Tray giggled. "I'll make you wing commander if you like" he said to me.

"Do I get a gun this time?" I asked, and then I took another bite of my Subway. I wasn't actually that hungry. "You want it?" I asked Tray, and he took it off me without checking that I was really sure.

So he might be prepared to take me out, but he wasn't going to hold back from snaffling up his sick sister's food.

"I don't think there'll be so many girls that we'll have to shoo them away with guns" Tray said, between mouthfuls.

I tried to get comfortable, but I was still in a lot of pain. Tray on the bed didn't really help; he was now telling some long, involved story that required a lot of arm-waving and making the bed move.

"How do you feel, anyway?" Sam asked, ignoring Tray and looking at me.

"Alright. Well…not great. It really hurts."

"But you get the good drugs" Tray told me.

"No. All I got was paracetamol. And I had to beg for that. I think they worry I'm going to turn into a drug addict or something. It didn't do anything." Really, it just summed up how shitty everything was for me about now.

Sam frowned a bit, and then disappeared outside the curtain. Tray looked at me. "I didn't fart" he said.

"Really. Please don't. It's a small fucking space and I'm stuck in here."

Tray laughed, and I thought he might actually go through with it, but then Nurse Bitchface who forgot me earlier turned up with Sam right behind her. She was momentarily stumped when she saw Tray sitting there. He tended to have that effect on people. I wasn't sure if they really found him that good-looking or if they just couldn't get past the sheer size of him.

"Oh. Um. You're in pain?" she asked me, really, really sweetly. Like she cared all of a sudden.

"Yes. Like I have been. For hours."

"Uh-huh" she said, glancing at Tray. Really, she was waaay too old for him.

"Well, don't worry, sweetie. I'll talk to the doctor and see if we can get you something stronger. OK?"

"OK" I agreed.

"When?" Sam asked, and she turned to look at him. He was smiling, not frowning at her, so I think she got confused. If it had been Dad he would have been frowning so she would have jumped to it. Sam was nice to everyone, though, which put them off.

I did kind of wish that Dad was here, though. Frowning at the stupid nurse.

"Um…soon. Very soon. I'll, um…well; maybe I'll go and page him…"

"That would be great" Sam said, and the nurse left.

"Dude! You should have asked her out" Tray said, and Sam just rolled his eyes.

They hung around for a bit longer, it was kind of nice. Better than being alone, anyway. And then the nurse came back with the new pills and they decided to leave. "Hope you get something nice for dinner" Tray said to me.

"Doubt it" I replied. I didn't hold out much hope for something edible.

"Oh well. Maybe Mum'll bring you in something. I wonder what she's making?" Tray mused.

"Oh, you fucking idiot. It's your turn to cook" Sam informed him.

"Really? Fuck. OK." Tray shrugged. I didn't hold out much hope they'd be getting something better than I was.

Tray hugged me. And then Sam hugged me. It was kind of nice, a bit weird. Normally they just tried to pretend I didn't exist. It might have only been because I was in hospital that they felt sorry for me, but at least they'd turned up. Mum had told them to, but even so.

Mum told them to pick their shit up on a regular basis and they didn't do that.

After I got the new pills I dozed for quite a while, and woke up to the sound of high heels clacking towards me. "There you are" Amelia announced.

"Yeah" I said. I was kind of sick of being here.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, sitting on the chair next to the bed.

"Like shit."

"One of the men at work had kidney stones. He says it's worse than labour. You should tell Mum that."

"Is it worse than five labours though? Mum's always going to win."

Amelia shrugged. "She's still never had kidney stones."

"I don't think I really feel like competing about now."

"No" Amelia said. "Poor you." She stroked my forehead, and one of her bangles hit me in the side of the face. She was wearing a lot of plastic bangles. And a dress in orange, white and black stripes combined with a magenta and green belt and red shoes. Black, lacy tights and big silver earrings and a necklace completed her look. It was a look. It was pure Amelia, but it was kind of busy.

I sometimes wondered if she'd look a bit nicer if she toned it down a notch or two.

"You've had a rough time" Amelia said. "First Dad being an arsehole, and now this."

"Mmm" I agreed. I didn't really want to talk about Dad. And I guessed Amelia didn't really want to talk about me, or thought we'd covered that subject anyway. What she really liked talking about was Amelia.

"How's work?" I asked.

"Oh, you know!" she sighed. "Busy, even at this time of year. People want to do mid-winter Christmas. Or Matariki celebrations, they're huge now. It's kind of…well. I'm a bit over it, really."

"Because of Cameron?" I asked her.

"Because of a lot of stuff. I think it was just time for me and Cameron to call it quits."

"Did he mind?"

"Of course he minded. That was the problem…he had it all mapped out. We'd get married and have babies, and I'd be Mum. I don't want to be Mum, though. I want to be me."

"No…well. I meant did he mind about the girls that you, you know, hooked up with?"

"Oh" Amelia said. "Oh, I think he thought it was hot. That was when he thought I'd picked him, of course. God knows what he thinks now. He won't talk to me." Amelia was quiet for a while. That was different.

"I might have a new job" she said.

"Oh?" I said. Mostly to be polite. I wasn't really that interested about Amelia's work. It was kind of flashy and seemed a bit pointless.

"In Melbourne."

"Oh."

"But I don't know…so don't tell them…anyone, yet. OK?"

"OK." Once I would have asked for something for keeping her secret; Amelia was good like that. You could usually get something out of her. But this time, I just felt sad about it. Like for all that everyone thought we were this big happy family, we weren't, because we had to hide all this stuff all the time. And I hated it.

Amelia chatted to me for a bit longer, and then Mum turned up again, with a bag of my stuff, which I was pleased to see.

"I can brush your hair!" Amelia said, happily, taking my hairbrush out of the bag. "You always did have the prettiest hair" she said.

"At least it's not curly" Mum said, pushing her's out of her face.

"Mine does that weird , wavy thing. I think that's from you" Amelia told her.

"Mmm. Yours is very thick though. Like Lorena's…and Bill's."

And there we were, talking about hair. And none of the important stuff.

Mum left again, she said she had to go and see if Tray had started dinner. I didn't tell her she'd be lucky. Amelia left, as she was going out for dinner with some girlfriends. That sounded nice.

I picked at my dinner. And then I dozed because there was nothing better to do. And when I woke up everything was a bit fuzzy, but I thought maybe there was someone else there with me.

I turned and looked at the chair. "Oh. It's you."

"They're just glasses, Pam. It's not much of a disguise" Dad said.

**A/N Matariki is the Maori New Year, usually celebrated in June when the Matariki (mar-tar-ree-kee) star cluster is visible to the naked eye in the pre-dawn sky.**

**Thanks for reading!**


	71. Bonus 2: The Dance of Lost Things

**A/N Phew! Took a while to get this done. My daughter though, has been to the art gallery with school. Mostly she was worried about the wastage there. She said "Mum, they just waste lollies. The ones in the wrappers, you get from Santa, they had them all strung up. With the lollies still inside! They don't even make noise!" Yeah, so she's not destined to be an art critic. Lollies are candy, or sweets in case you missed that one. Not something you'd want to waste if you're a kid!**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were they'd be doing my laundry and my vacuuming so I could spend more time writing. **

SPOV

The problem with spending half the night in the hospital was that no one wanted to get up when the morning rolled around. I included myself in that. I thought about getting up. I considered it quite seriously for all of about five seconds when the stupid alarm started beeping.

And then I switched it off and would have rolled over, if I had to the room to do so. As it was I was almost over the edge of the bed, thanks to the combined efforts of both Eric and Claude who wanted to cling to me for dear life.

So I just closed my eyes and went back to sleep. Until I heard the whispering outside the door. Well they probably thought it was whispering. It wasn't really.

It was quite loud. It woke up Claude, who flicked his tail on my face in annoyance, and then proceeded to cover my mouth with it in a misplaced attempt to smother me to death.

"Go away" I whispered to Claude. Claude didn't go away. There was some more whispering that wasn't really whispering and then, through the door, Sam said "What's happening?"

I hoped that Claude would answer him knowing that, from the snores behind me, Eric was probably a dead loss.

Claude just tried to put his tail in my ear.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

The door opened a bit and Sam said "There's a note. On the kitchen bench. You took Pam to hospital?"

"Mmm" I agreed. We had. I could remember it. I had the tiredness to prove it.

"Is she OK?" Sam asked.

"She's um…" I tried to work out how to say it in about two words. Behind me Eric snorted, stretched and rolled over in one movement and then muttered "What the fuck?"

"It's a kidney stone…probably" I said.

"What?" asked Tray.

"Pam" Sam and I said together. "So what happens then?" Sam asked.

"Um…they'll, um…" God, words were hard.

"She's been admitted and they're going to examine her today and keep her under observation" Eric supplied. Oh good. I was glad he could remember what was going on. I was feeling a little fuzzy still. Also, if I opened my mouth I was likely to end up with cat fur in it. Claude's tail was still flicking around my head.

Did anyone say 'under observation' in real life, though? I thought that was just on TV.

Oh well. I figured no one would mind if I went back to sleep.

"So, Mum? She's OK then?" Sam asked.

"Yeah…" I said. Really, I thought Eric was carrying the conversational burden for me.

"Sweet. Breakfast time!" Tray said happily, and I could hear him thumping off down the hall. "Fucking watch out, Ivan" he yelled at poor Ivan, which seemed a bit mean. Ivan felt the same kind of joy about breakfast as Tray himself did, but, now that he was a bit elderly, he tended to just wander in front of people and cut them off as they tried to make their way down the hall.

"So…um…she's coming out later on?" Sam asked.

"Dunno" Eric replied. I guess he'd used up his allotted amount of medical terms ripped off of TV shows. I hunkered down in an effort to try to avoid Claude's tail, and the rest of his fur. Long-haired cats were a pain in the bum.

Sam must have left, and, I assumed, Eric went back to sleep. I went back to sleep. That was nice. For a while, anyway, and then the bed started shifting around and Claude got grumpy and sat up, covering my face with his tail in the process, and I figured we were getting up now.

"I should get up" Eric informed me. "I've got shit to do."

Yeah, me too. But nothing that probably wouldn't wait for an hour, or two. Or three.

Claude stretched and walked across my shoulders to jump off the bed. Eric stretched and his foot pushed me in the calf.

I guess we were getting up then.

Sam and Tray were still hanging about in the kitchen when we got there. "Shouldn't you guys be somewhere?" Eric asked them.

Tray shrugged. "It's the last day of term. Not much is gonna happen."

For a moment Eric looked like he might argue that point, but then he gave up. It reminded me that I needed to let Pam's school know she wasn't going to be in, though. I went into my office to send her teacher an email and leave a message with the office. The teacher came back and said she thought Pam had all her assignments, but she'd ask around.

Jeez, don't put yourself out, I thought.

I went back to the kitchen to find Eric making coffee and Tray nearly elbowing him out of the way. Poor Eric, he didn't look all that thrilled with Tray's presence. There wasn't much he could do about it though; trying to move Tray was like trying to move a kauri tree. It really wasn't something you wanted to take on in a hurry.

Eric handed me some coffee, and then he moved so Tray could help himself. "So, I guess we should go in this morning" I said. "And see Pam."

"Mmm" Eric said, thoughtfully. He took a sip. "I might have something on though…"

"Oh" I said, trying not to be too disappointed on Pam's account. After all, they'd been best buddies when she was at the hospital, so no reason to think the worst.

"I think…where's my phone?" Eric asked, looking around helplessly.

"I don't know." I had no clue. I could barely remember getting home, I'd been so tired.

"Probably with my wallet…and keys…" Eric mused.

"Your wallet's over there" Tray said, helpfully pointing to where it lay on the kitchen bench, next to the note I'd written before we'd left for the hospital.

"Hmmm" Eric said. Then he turned to look at me.

"No" I said, automatically. "I don't know."

Eric looked a bit annoyed with me, and then he walked out of the kitchen. I put some bread in the toaster and looked at Aud on the windowsill. "You know" I said to her, "if we traded you in for a bloodhound, at least I wouldn't have to find everything around here."

"I lost my watch" Tray announced from inside the fridge where he was doing inventory of the contents. Again.

"You never wear your watch" I said to him.

"Yeah" he agreed, pulling out a container and lifting the lid before taking a sniff of its contents.

"So how long has it been lost for?" I asked him, as he screwed up his face, put the lid back on the container and slid it back into the fridge.

"Dunno" he said. "I don't wear a watch." He moved over to inspect the pantry instead.

I heard the front door open and Eric say "Stay inside Ivan. No. Inside. INSIDE!" Ivan's feet clattered out onto the front porch and down the steps. My toast popped up and I tried to get past Tray to find out if we had any peanut butter.

I was just taking the first bite of my toast when Eric came back. "Well my phone's in the car" he announced. "But I cannot find my fucking keys, so that's particularly fucking useless. Why does every goddamned thing around here just disappear the moment it leaves your hand?" He held up his hands in frustration. He wasn't, I noted, holding the coffee cup that had left in the kitchen in one of his hands just a little while earlier. I was tempted to mention that it might be his penchant for putting things down in random places that caused the problem, but decided against it.

"I lost my watch" Tray threw in again, but Eric didn't care. He walked over and stood looking at his wallet again. "Well…" he said. "I put that there." And then he stood there with his hands on his hips, watching the wallet, in case it revealed the location of the missing keys.

The wallet failed to co-operate.

"Hey!" Sam called out, "Ivan's outside the front door."

Eric didn't react to that. He was still busy silently interrogating the wallet.

I looked at Aud and raised my eyebrows, but she looked away. Yeah, she knew, but she just didn't want to admit it.

The front door opened and closed and Ivan came puffing and panting down the hall and into the kitchen, happy he'd at least located what he was looking for. He sat happily and panted at Eric, completely oblivious to the fact that it was Eric who'd left him behind outside.

"I don't fucking understand it" Eric muttered.

"Are we looking for his glasses?" Sam asked me.

"Keys" I said.

"Oh."

"I lost my watch" Tray said, again.

"No you didn't, you moron. It's in the glovebox of my car, along with all your other shit."

"Oh. Cool." Tray went back to his previous occupation of drinking coffee and eating…oh, jeez. Cold baked beans out of a can.

And then, in a moment of what I guess was total frustration with the world and everything in it, Eric did this weird thing where he kind of jumped on the spot and did a little waving of the arms.

The boys ignored him. Ivan just panted. Aud was busy licking her paw.

I giggled. "Is that the dance of lost things?" I asked.

Eric looked at me, and then he grinned broadly, and did it again.

I giggled again, only this time, I couldn't really stop. And he kept bloody doing it, so I kept giggling, and it wasn't long before I was bent over with tears streaming down my face, really hoping I didn't wet myself.

It might have been because I was tired and a bit silly. It might have been because it was Eric. But, my God, in that moment, it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.

Tray gave me an odd look. Sam gave Eric an even odder look, like he couldn't believe what an idiot his dad was, or why I thought that was funny. But it was, it was the funniest thing I had seen in a long time, and Eric was really playing up to me now, flinging his arms around and frowning.

"Do you ever wonder how the fuck we turned out so normal?" Tray asked Sam.

Sam just continued staring at Eric for a bit. Then he said "What's this we? I think I'm the fucking normal one."

"Yeah. Hah!" Tray said.

Meanwhile I had had to sit down on the floor where I was, as I couldn't stand up any longer while giggling that much.

"Mum's lost it" Tray observed.

"Yeah" Sam said, glowering at Eric, like it was his fault. Well it was, but I wasn't complaining because it was just so damned _funny_.

"Oh, Jesus" I said, wiping my eyes and wishing I had a tissue to hand because my nose was running too. "That's hilarious."

"Yes, but it doesn't solve the problem" Eric said. "I really thought that fucking dance would work."

"Maybe you're doing it wrong" I said, as I got up onto my knees. Eric held out his hand to help me up the rest of the way, and I debated taking it for a moment. It was one thing to feel like an old lady, it was a bit disheartening when the family treated me like one.

I admitted defeat and took Eric's hand and he hauled me up off the floor.

"Have you tried re-tracing your steps?" Sam asked Eric.

"Well, yes. I came in here, put my wallet down…and fuck knows who took my keys. Claude maybe?"

Well, Claude had been known to steal the odd shiny thing, but mostly that was limited to hair-clips and the lids of beer bottles. I thought a set of keys were a bit ambitious, even for him.

He would have had to recruit Ivan, and I couldn't see them forming much of a partnership.

"I don't know" I said.

"Well, he was hanging about when we got in, looking for you" Eric said. "Because I came in here, and he was on the fucking table again, so I lifted him off and he tried to climb me instead, and then you said 'do you think the boys got up and read the note?' and I said…oh."

I didn't think that was what he'd said, but he walked out of the room which cut the recounting of the conversation we'd had in the early hours of the morning short. "So are you guys going into uni?" I asked Tray and Sam.

Tray shrugged and looked at Sam. "It's the last day of term" Sam supplied. "So…dunno."

"Aren't there still lectures?" I asked.

Tray looked thoughtful, like the concept of lectures didn't maybe apply to the engineering department. Sam gave a small shrug. "Nothing important" he said.

"I thought it was the tax lecture on Fridays?" I asked. I had a vague idea of when everything was.

"Yeah…but, you know…" Sam said. I didn't really. I knew he didn't like the tax paper much, but I thought that he probably still needed to actually attend the lectures.

And then Eric walked back in anyway, holding his keys in triumph. "Where were they?" I asked.

"Ah. Well. In the pocket."

"Of?"

"My jeans…the ones I put in the laundry hamper." I did remember Eric saying something about 'hospital smell' as he'd stripped off every item he'd been wearing and added it to my already large pile of washing. "I knew it was Claude's fault" he announced.

"How is that Claude's fault?" I asked.

"I got distracted because I had to pick him up off the fucking table, Sookie. If I hadn't had to put my keys somewhere quickly, then I wouldn't have put them in a pocket. Here." He held the keys out to Sam. "Go and get my phone out of the car."

Sam sighed, but took the proffered keys and turned to walk out the door. "You know, sometimes it's nice to say please" I said to Eric, as I put my now empty cup in the dishwasher, along with the one Sam had retrieved earlier.

"Sometimes" Eric agreed, but he didn't say anything else to poor Sam who was now, I guessed, on his way out the front door.

Tray was looking at something on his phone. "Leesh is having fun" he said, kind of morosely. "I wish I could go and join her for the holidays."

"No" Eric said, quickly. "I'm not paying to fly you to London for a week. It'll have to come out of the car money."

Tray sighed, but it was a good bet he shelved that idea pretty quickly. Unlike the other three older kids, he'd refused Eric's offer of a small, safe, reliable hatchback when he started university and instead had taken the cash and was slowly adding to it through the money he made working part-time at JB Hifi, in the hope of one day being able to afford some kind of large car with an annoying turbo and shiny mag wheels. He had told us all what make and model he wanted to buy; I just hadn't cared enough to remember the details.

In the meantime, he was stuck scabbing all his rides from Sam and was tighter with money than even my father had been.

"She's not even in London" Tray announced. "She's in Ibiza for a long weekend."

"Why? What? Did we fucking know that?" Eric came over to peer at Tray's phone.

"I don't know…but it rings a bell?" I said. It kind of sounded like something I'd been told. "Anyway, you're the one who stalks her on Facebook."

"That's not stalking. That's, uh, checking in" Eric announced, as Sam arrived back and handed him his own phone. Sam didn't even bother waiting for a thank-you; he just turned around and left again. Eric started checking his phone. I stared out the window and contemplated going to have a shower so I could go in and see Pam.

"Fuck" Eric said, which, I have to admit, kind of washed over me. I really was immune these days.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!" he said, rather more vehemently.

"What?" I asked.

"I'm supposed to be…fuck. I'm supposed to be in a meeting. A god-damned all day off-site bunch of crap that I'm supposed to be fucking leading for some shitty know-nothing team of fucking investment analysts and I'm supposed to be there, in half a fucking hour. Fuck. Mustapha had better fucking be on his way there with the presentation." And then he walked out of the room and I could hear him talking to Mustapha. I didn't quite see how it was his problem if Eric was supposed to be in charge of the day, but I guess these kinds of problems trickled down.

And I figured I'd just lost my place in the queue for the shower in our ensuite.

"Is Dad OK?" Tray asked, as he stood up.

"Yeah" I said. "But it's Mustapha I worry about." Tray gave me an odd look, like I really had lost the plot entirely. "OK, well. You go back to thinking about dinner then." With that, he sauntered out of the room.

I really hoped that he remembered it was his turn to cook tonight.

I eventually made it back to the hospital about mid-morning and poor Pam looked miserable. I couldn't really blame her. I felt awful about her being in here, and really wished I could take her home, but I spoke to one of the doctors, when I could track someone down, and they said they wanted to keep her in because they were hoping she'd pass the stone and that would be that.

It didn't sound as though that would be much fun for Pam, so I decided not to break that news to her. Maybe I would just bring in the phone she'd said she wanted.

Of course she also wanted Eric to visit, that much was plain. But he was off doing God knows what, which probably involved a lot of bossing Mustapha around at any rate, and I didn't want to promise something I couldn't personally deliver.

But I was pretty sure he'd come through. Surely the night before counted for something?

When I got back home Tray and Sam were still loitering. Tray hadn't even dressed yet, which caused Sam a small amount of consternation when Tray decided to loll about on the couch with one foot up on the couch which gave a perfect view right up the leg of his boxer shorts.

"Oh, for fuck's sake. Put it away."

"Nah. Don't fucking perve at me. I'm not a piece of meat."

"You're just a fucking meat-head."

"Hey" I interjected, before things got too heated and had to be settled in a bout of hand-to-hand combat which would result in major casualties amongst the contents of the coffee table. "Um…do you guys want to take Pam's phone to her?"

"Nah" Tray said.

"Maybe you could take her lunch too?" I suggested.

"Is there lunch?" Tray asked, looking around.

"Well, buy her something and take it. Something she'll like."

Tray screwed up his face. "I don't want to pay for her lunch" he said. "Isn't she getting fed at the hospital?"

"I'll pay you back" I said to him. "But I think she'd like the company."

Tray sighed, and stood up. "You have to wear pants if you're coming with me" Sam said to him, and Tray mumbled something and kept walking. I hoped that would keep them occupied, and give Pam some company.

I hoped Tray wore pants to the hospital.

While they were gone I tried to do housework and not fall asleep. For a while there, it was looking like falling asleep might win, but the boys arrived back and thankfully roused me before my bout of just closing for my eyes for a moment turned into something more approaching a nap.

"Pam's not very happy" Sam said.

"Pam's really grumpy" Tray added.

"That's because you ate her lunch."

"She didn't want it! She'd had lunch already. I said she would have."

It didn't sound as though things were great. I did some baking to keep myself awake and keep occupied, and then wondered why I'd bothered when half of it got eaten when my back was turned by Tray and Sam. I made another trip up to the hospital in the late afternoon, to find Amelia already bedside. I'd phoned her at work to tell her Pam was in hospital in the hope she'd visit too and join the cheer-up brigade. Amelia took the opportunity of Pam being bedridden to brush her hair, which had always been one of her favourite past-times. Pam did have lovely hair. It was just a shame she wasn't in a lovely mood. It was hard to blame her; I just wished I could have put it right.

It was awful when your kid was in hospital.

When I got back home again, Tray was in his usual spot in the kitchen, and Sam was there too. I hated the university holidays as more time hanging around at home meant more food got eaten and higher grocery bills. Eric would wax lyrical about the glorious American model where 'everyone' goes away for college, but no one in our family cared much. What Tray cared most about, at that point in time, was dinner.

"Hey, I'm cooking, right?" he asked.

"Uh-huh."

"So, I have a plan."

"Really?" I asked, as Sam looked at him as well. This was new. Tray never had a plan for dinner. Most of the time he didn't even remember it was his turn to cook, and then he'd try to get out of it.

"Yeah. You know that lamb you do? The one in the slow cooker? I'm gonna do that."

Sam rolled his eyes. I tried to think of a way to break it to him. "Um…but it's for the slow cooker, Tray."

"Yeah. I know. I haven't used that yet."

"So, um…it needs to be in the slow-cooker."

"Yep."

"Which cooks _slowly_" Sam pointed out.

"Yep" Tray said again.

"So it needs to be in there all day. From the morning, at least. There's nothing in there now."

"Oh" Tray said, sadly. "Oh, fuck."

"So what's your back-up plan?" Sam asked him, while grinning. He was enjoying this, at least.

"Um…um…" Tray looked thoughtful, and then he sighed heavily. "I guess I could shout you all pizza" he said, morosely. "But you can't have the expensive ones, and I'm not paying for delivery so someone'll have to go and pick it up."

"That's not making dinner" Sam complained.

"No, but at least I'm fucking _providing _dinner, so it still counts."

"No it fucking doesn't."

"Yes. It fucking does."

This argument could go on for a while, and, really, I was too tired to deal with it just then.

"There must be something else…" I mused. "What about just doing some sausages…"

"Curried sausages?" Tray asked, hopefully.

"I guess" I said with a lot less enthusiasm than Tray was demonstrating. I wasn't a huge fan of curried sausages, having been force-fed them as a kid, but I could manage them from time to time. Eric downright despised them, considering them some weird English dish which just ruined perfectly good sausages by cooking them in a sauce flavoured almost entirely by old-fashioned curry powder. But the kids had all discovered it at daycare, where it was a staple part of the menu, and I'd been forced to serve it more than once by popular demand.

Tray loved curried sausages. I guessed it wouldn't be a bad thing to know how to cook them. "I'll get the Edmonds cookbook" I said to him.

"Sweet!" he said, happily.

We made it through the cooking lesson and Eric arrived home just in time to sit down with us. As predicted his mood wasn't helped by the dinner he was served. "It's the colour that's off-putting" he commented. "The green tinge to the sauce…is just, well…maybe it's the smell I don't like?"

"I like them" Tray said, with his mouth stuffed full of sausage and rice. It was nice he enjoyed his own cooking.

After dinner, Eric cornered me. "So how was she?" he said, without any preamble. I pretty much knew who he was talking about, though.

"She's a bit miserable" I said. "And they want to keep her in for the weekend, just to see if it passes by itself…so, you know." I hoped he did.

Eric looked thoughtful, but didn't say anything, so I continued on. "You should go up there" I said. "Keep her company."

"She's probably tired. I should let her rest."

"She's done nothing all day but lie in bed. I think she'll cope. So go on, take her some of the biscuits up. She'd love that." Eric looked like he was about to form a rebuttal to that, so I cut him off.

"That dance of lost things. It only works on objects." Not daughters, I added silently.

Eric looked at me for a good, long time. I think he might have heard the part I said in my head. "OK" he said in the end. "I'll go."

EPOV

I had an epically shitty day starting with the lost keys and ending with me wanting to murder Mustapha as he kowtowed to the annoying assholes we were working with and promised them more of our time the following week. I'd been late getting there in the morning, and I was late home and it just felt like every fucking thing was going wrong for me.

Plus Pam was in hospital. Maybe that had really been the shitty start to the day.

It was all a fucking pile of crap, and I just wanted it to be over with. I wanted Pam out of the hospital because visiting her there…fuck. I hated fucking hospitals.

And when I got there she was asleep anyway. So I just sat there. And I waited. And I watched Pam sleep.

She was so pale, paler than usual. Her eyelashes were almost transparent. I'd almost forgotten; I was so used to her wearing makeup these days.

She looked so small lying in that hospital bed. Small and defenceless and I wanted to scoop her up and take her home. I was pretty sure no one would stop me. It wasn't like they really had much security around for one thing.

But maybe she was better off here, with the doctors…even the ones who seemed to be about twelve. I'm pretty sure there were a few of them who'd got their medical degrees from a cornflake box.

If they could fix her though…if they could make her better. Then it would be worth the worry.

Maybe.

Probably.

I wondered if any specialists were available at this time on a Friday night.

And then Pam woke up. She didn't seem all that thrilled to see me; she certainly didn't seem to be expecting I'd be here.

I was a little hurt at that. Once upon a time she wouldn't have wanted anyone but me, and she would have been inconsolable until I showed up. Once upon a time I wouldn't have even hesitated before I came here, or I would have been here all day, investment bankers and their off-site be fucking damned.

Once upon a time I would have known what the fuck to say to make it all better.

"How are you feeling?" I asked her.

"Grotty" Pam said.

"Pain?"

"Yeah. Although it was better when Sam got me better stuff from the nurse. They're kind of stingy with the drugs. I think they think I'm a secret drug addict."

"He did?" I shouldn't have been surprised. Sam could usually be relied on to look after his siblings; he was like Sookie in that regard. I had no fucking clue what was going to happen to Tray if Sam ever stopped babysitting him. I suspected that at some point I'd find out when I got called to go and pay his bail.

"Yep. I think the nurse fancied him. Or Tray. Or both of them. I don't know why though. I mean, euw!" Pam looked at me, and then ducked her head down. Oh, right. Yeah. It wasn't just because they were her brothers that she didn't understand it, she was gay.

It wasn't what I was focussing on just at that moment.

"They gave me a crappy dinner" she said after a moment or two. "I don't even really know what it was."

"I had curried sausages. Cooked by Tray." I was still feeling the after-effects of that dinner. It was not sitting right and I wondered if it ever fucking would.

"Oh, bleurgh" Pam said. "They're bad enough when Mum makes them."

"Yes" I agreed. I'd forgotten that the other person who hated them was Pam.

"And Tray can't really cook" Pam added. "So…were they even edible?"

"Marginally so. Unfortunately." Fuck, they were awful.

"Do you think they'll have curried sausages in here?" Pam asked. She looked worried. She probably should be. They'd served them all the time at that daycare the kids went to and she'd always come home and insisted they'd tried to feed her snails and she wasn't going back again.

It was a fucking weird thing to do to sausages.

"No, I think you'll be OK" I said. And then I remembered. "I brought something, anyway. Mom baked." I pulled the package out of my jacket pocket.

"Oooh. Cookies!" Pam said enthusiastically.

"Yes" I agreed. "Cookies." I loved that Pam didn't want to fucking argue over whether they were really biscuits when it was quite plain that they were, in fact, chocolate chip cookies.

We were silent for a while as we both ate the cookies. Then a Pacific Island woman popped her head in between the curtain around Pam's bed. "You want tea or coffee?" she asked.

"I'll have tea" Pam said. "Dad'll have coffee."

It occurred to me only after we'd both been handed our cups that it was quite possible they weren't intending to serve drinks to visitors in a public hospital. But they'd done it, without question, so it wasn't worth worrying about.

And I was pretty sure my taxes covered it, anyway.

"What's happening at home?" Pam asked.

"Oh, Sam went to work. Trays doing…fuck knows what. Sookie's watching that show where people have babies and they film them." I couldn't see the point of that show, but Sookie loved it. I think that secretly she liked to compete with the people they filmed and prove that really, she was the best at giving birth.

"Well that sounds boring" Pam said.

"Yep."

I tried to think of what to say next, and Pam, I think, mistook my silence for something else. "But it's boring here, too" she said. "So if you want, you can go."

"No, this is OK."

"But you hate hospitals."

"I do. But, you know. It's OK here." It was OK being here, with Pam. I'd maybe forgotten in all the stuff that had been going on, that underneath it all, I did really like Pam. Whether that was because I'd been the one who'd wanted her so badly, or that we'd been through the trauma after her birth together, or whether it was just because she was the one who seemed to like me the most, I didn't know.

"You kept saying it last night, that you hated hospitals. That you didn't want to ever sit in a fucking hospital again…and it's because you got stuck with me, isn't it?" Pam was suddenly defiant. "You got stuck with me, and I was a mistake and you hated everything about it."

"Oh. No." Fuck, I hadn't realised how much she'd heard last night, at the time it had seemed she'd been drifting in and out of consciousness, and not really hearing much at all. And maybe she'd pieced it all together out of context.

"Well, that's what you said" Pam repeated, accusingly. "I heard you."

"I hate hospitals because it means someone's sick, and I hate the fucking worry" I said to her. "I mean, how the fuck do I know if they're doing the right thing to treat you? I don't, and I just…fuck. I wish I did." I did. I wondered if Pam wanted to go to medical school. It might be better if we had a doctor in the family.

Pam sighed, but didn't say anything. "And you weren't a mistake" I said. "Quite the opposite."

"What do you mean?"

"Well…you were more the product of a carefully orchestrated campaign to persuade Sookie that one more child would mean we'd reach optimum numbers."

Pam looked at me sharply. "You mean you had to nag Mum so she'd have me?"

"No. Well…OK, that's not _quite_ how it was…but there was some, uh, well. I did have to use a few persuasive arguments."

"So how come when you say no to me, you always say I should be happy with no, when you're not?" Pam demanded. Fuck. I hated it when Pam picked up on what I'd done.

Although I kind of liked it too. She was the one who was always quickest to cut through the bullshit, and try to find what was in it for her. I was almost proud of that.

"Well, it was different" I said, hoping that would be the end of the matter.

"I bet you regret it now" Pam grumbled.

"Only slightly, but as long as you never, ever use it against me, then I think we'll be OK." I smiled at Pam, but she didn't really return it.

"No, because well…you know…I'm not…because I'm gay." Her voice had trailed off until it was little more than a whisper.

"I don't think that makes a difference" I said.

"But it did!" Pam insisted. "I told you and you stopped talking to me, and you wanted me to change and I tried and I just can't! I can't be any different. Like I couldn't help getting a stupid kidney stone. No one else gets a freaking kidney stone at 16!"

"No" I agreed. "You're the first one in the family to have that."

"Great" Pam said. "So I'm the first one to come out and have you hate me, and the first one to get a kidney stone and be stuck in hospital, and everything fucking sucks. My life sucks. I said that to Amelia, but she thinks her life sucks more. She always does. And Felicia's life doesn't suck because she's at a party. In Ibiza." Pam crossed her arms and stared straight ahead.

"I don't hate you" I said. "I just don't want you to be unhappy."

"Well I am!" Pam said. "So you suck at that."

She was right, in a way. I hadn't been able to stop her getting a kidney stone, sure. And I couldn't change that she was gay. I'd never be able to stop anything bad happening to her, in the same way I couldn't make Amelia marry that guy who proposed to her or tell Felicia to stop doing body shots with that Thomo and his friend Daimo, and get the fuck home now.

Ivan was the only one who ever really listened to me, and I'd left him outside this morning. Fuck, I really did suck at it. I thought I'd had it all under control. I'd thought that now the days of kids eating Barbie shoes, and running off, falling off of swings and bikes, and asking me random fucking questions about fairies and Romans were over it would be easy.

It wasn't. It was fucking harder. I wasn't convinced it would ever be easier.

"I'm sorry" I said.

"What?" Pam asked.

"I apologised. For making you feel like I hated you. I just…I worry."

"Well I'm hardly going to steal Mum off you" Pam said. I laughed. "You just worry about me because I'm the youngest" she grumbled. "It's like you don't think I can do anything. Like when we read _The Hunger Games_ and I wanted a bow so I could be like Katniss and you said no. Probably because you thought I'd put my eye out, or something."

"Well, mostly I was worried about your brothers. You do have quite good aim. You're usually the best at getting fucking Claude with the water pistol."

Pam smiled at that. "I do have great aim" she said. "And Claude is pain in the ass."

"That he is" I agreed. "But even with your outstanding water pistol skills, I still worry about you. I always will. I guess..." Fuck, I didn't know how to put it so she'd understand that it wasn't about her, it was never about her. It was about all the other fuckers in the world who might hurt her. "I worry it'll be tougher on you than on the others…you won't fit the norm."

"I fit my norm" Pam said.

"Yeah" I agreed. "You do." I looked at her. She was still the person I'd wanted, the one I'd told Sookie was missing when I'd wanted to have another baby. She was still Pam.

"What?" Pam asked, squirming a little under my scrutiny.

"Just…well. I do love you, you know. Nothing will change that."

Pam sighed. "Well you have a shit way of showing it."

"I do. But it doesn't mean it isn't true."

"I guess."

"So as long as you're happy, I'll stand by you. You know that?"

"I suppose" Pam said, grudgingly. And then she turned to look at me. "I love you too, Daddy" she said. I leaned over the edge of the bed to put my arms around her, and she rested her head on my shoulder. We sat like that for a long time, until a nurse came to deliver some more pills to Pam and I got the impression that my presence here was no longer required by the nursing staff.

"I'd better go" I said to Pam.

"Yeah" she said. "I wish I could." It broke my fucking heart; I wanted to bring her home, more than anything right then.

"I know" I said. "But I'll be back tomorrow."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

I kissed her on the cheek and stood up. "Get some rest."

"OK. 'Night, Daddy."

"'Night, Pam." I walked out of the hospital room and down the corridor feeling like I'd left a part of me behind.

**Thanks for reading!**


	72. Bonus 2: Restless

**A/N Back again, which means the kids have gone a bit neglected and, today, the five year old went to school in an outfit picked by her two year old sister. Colour co-ordination is not her strong suit. Climbing onto the rubbish bin to steal lollies is her strong suit, but we won't go into that because it makes me sound like a really bad mother!**

**So a big thank-you to everyone still with me on this, and place your orders for anything you want to see in the future (even if it's back in time). I have a terribly overdue promise to fulfill to peppermintyrose as a belated birthday gift, but after that, I've available for a very reasonable price ;D**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

SPOV

When Eric got back from the hospital, he was a little restless. In some ways, that was a relief, because I was trying to hide the fact that I'd been all weepy over a TV show about people having babies. I quite enjoyed the whole experience vicariously, I'd discovered, and I always felt a bit emotional when the babies actually arrived.

Maybe it was a sign I was ready to be a grandmother.

Maybe not.

At any rate, I was snapped out of my soppiness pretty quickly by Eric, who wasn't only restless. He was annoying too. "I don't know why you want to watch that show if it's just going to make you cry" he said to me.

"I wasn't crying" I lied outright.

"And it seems very weird that they want it to be filmed, the birth. You didn't even like me taking photos of you afterwards."

"No, well I was a bit sweaty, and my hair looked all damp and yuck."

"Mmm. Seems like they want to be famous for anything."

I didn't answer; I could tell I wasn't going to persuade him otherwise. Eric found something else to do.

He annoyed Tray by turning a discussion about the car Tray wanted to buy into a lecture on why Eric thought Tray's choice was a bit hopeless. Sam came home from work and Eric went off to annoy him by asking lots of questions about uni, and, more specifically, the hated tax paper. When Sam finally shook him off, Eric annoyed Claude by lifting him off the kitchen table, and Aud by removing her from the window sill and, thus, placing her in the same category as Claude when she knew darn well she was special.

He annoyed Ivan simply by wandering around doing all of this at a time of night when Ivan really thought Eric should be sitting down so Ivan could lie at his feet, snoring. Then, before Eric could start the cycle again and go back to annoying me, I thought I might go to bed.

I passed Tray in the hallway. "Dad's fucking grumpy" he announced. "And he's got shit ideas about cars." I didn't comment on that one, I just nodded and kept walking. I didn't want to hear about all the reasons Tray thought his pick was better than Eric's. Some things just didn't need to involve me.

I was just starting the washing machine when Sam walked into the laundry to bring me the shirt he'd worn to work which smelt unpleasantly of grease and hamburger. Well, it was unpleasant to me. Ivan, who had followed Sam in, had other ideas.

"If we just took him to the consulate, do you think they'd take him back?" Sam asked me.

"I don't know" I said, as I threw the shirt into the machine and added in some fabric softener. "I think you'd have to take him to the embassy."

"That'd work."

"The American Embassy is in Wellington. Do you want to sit in a car with him for eight hours while you drive down there?"

I shut the lid of the washing machine. Sam looked thoughtful. "Well…not really. Maybe Tray could take him? He'd like the challenge of seeing if he could do an eight hour drive in less than seven."

"It'd never work. They'd refuse to look at a map, argue over how to program the GPS, and end up killing each other before they hit Palmerston North. No, we're stuck with him. Hopefully he'll be better in the morning."

"Hopefully" Sam said, grudgingly, and then he walked out into the kitchen.

I made it into bed without crossing paths with Eric again, but I wasn't alone in bed for long. There was some muttering, and the bed sank down. Claude disappeared from my pillow and there was a dull thud and an indignant "Mrow!" to which Eric replied "Fuck off, Claude."

There was more swearing when Eric tried to put his glasses on the bedside table, and they tumbled over the edge, then the light went off, went on again as he remembered to turn his phone to silent. There was a pause. Then the phone got picked up. "I might leave it on. In case Pam wants anything" he said.

"Uh-huh." I was pretty tired after the events of the previous night and not really in the mood for conversation, even if the bed did seem to be bouncing in a most annoying fashion.

Eventually, Eric stopped shuffling around and I thought I might get some sleep.

Eric had other ideas.

He moved over my side of the bed and put one arm over me, while sniffing my neck. "You smell nice" he announced.

It wasn't his smoothest line, but I couldn't honestly say it hadn't worked on me before. As the person in the house least inclined to deport Eric at this point in time, it was pretty obvious I wasn't immune to his charms.

Eric was now attempting some serious nuzzling, combined with enthusiastic boob-squeezing. "You feel nice too" he murmured.

I could pretty much see where this was going, and it shouldn't have been much of a surprise. It wasn't the first time Eric had decided to use sex as a way to cheer himself up when he was out of sorts.

It wasn't necessarily a bad trait. After all, we most likely had Pam to show for Eric's penchant for using sex as a distraction from whatever he didn't want to deal with at the time.

Poor Pam. I hoped she was OK. Hospital wasn't great at the best of times, and being sixteen probably made it worse. I hoped she wasn't too upset, and that we got to bring her home soon.

Now I needed distracting.

"If you loosened your grip a bit, I could roll over" I said to Eric.

"If I loosen my grip, will you run?" Eric whispered in my ear.

"Well…where the hell am I going to go, Eric? Without the boys noticing, anyway?"

Eric sighed. "You won't let me have any fun" he grumbled. He did, however, loosen his grip. I rolled over.

"And chasing me around the house is fun?" I was old, and tired, and I really didn't fancy having to make a run for it.

"Only if you let me catch you" Eric said.

"Let's just pretend that already happened, and move on."

"You take all the romance out of it."

"How is chasing me around romantic?"

Eric didn't answer that one; he just busied himself groping my bum.

"This is easier if you're not wearing pants" Eric said, as he tried to get my pants off.

"You know, it might even be easier if you let me take them off myself."

"You really do want to take away all my fun, don't you Sookie?"

"No. I just wanted to be a little bit involved, is all."

Eric sighed. "I'll let you take my pants off."

I moved my hand down to Eric's hip. "Well, that's a trick because you're not wearing any."

"No. I'm prepared, Sookie. It takes me a while to warm up these days and I can't just stop to remove clothing."

"You're very optimistic, aren't you?" I asked him.

Eric kissed me, and then pulled back and said "Maybe I just know you're a sure thing."

"Oh, look. There's that romance we were missing."

"This isn't the time for sarcasm. I have more important issues to deal with. What the fuck is wrong with your pyjamas, Sookie?"

"For a start, they're tied on." I reached down between us and undid the drawstring tie.

"That's a design flaw" Eric muttered.

"Not for those of us with big bums and smaller waists" I pointed out. Eric didn't exactly have that problem, although I guessed it wasn't really a problem he was going to have if he wasn't even going to bother with pyjamas. "Leaving your t-shirt on was a good look" I commented, as I shuffled out of my pants.

"I don't want to get cold" Eric said. "OK, you're ready. Excellent." I'd no sooner got my pants all the way off than Eric rolled me over onto my back.

I tried to muster annoyed, but all I got was giggles. As far as Eric was concerned, it was a green light.

"I'm not that much of a sure thing" I tried protesting, but I don't think Eric believed me. After all this time, I barely believed it myself.

Eric had given up groping and moved on to tickling. "Stop it!" I hissed, as I tried to swat his hands away from my waist.

"No."

"I don't want to hurt you" I said.

"Mmm" Eric agreed, diplomatically.

"Shut up."

"Sookie, I think you'll find I did not say a word" Eric said, grinning down at me.

"You realise I'm old and it takes me a while to work up to this" I muttered, as Eric gave up on the tickling and shoved a hand up my pyjama top.

"I think you should give yourself more credit" Eric said. "You're quite into me, you know."

"Whatever!" I sounded like Pam, I knew, but sometimes sounding like a teenager just fitted the bill.

"You liked my dance" Eric pointed out. "You laughed."

"So that's what you're basing this on? You think you've scored?"

"No. I know I have" Eric said, as he kissed my neck. "After all, you took your pants off."

Well, he wasn't wrong.

Sex certainly distracted Eric, but maybe not as much as he had hoped because whereas I was just about ready to fall into a coma when we'd finished, he couldn't get comfortable, which meant I wasn't allowed to stay comfortable for long.

Even Claude, who snuck back into the bedroom and tried crouching on my pillow, gave up pretty quickly due to the giant who kept tossing and turning at intervals seemingly designed to disturb me just as I reached the cusp of sleep every time.

I wondered whether if I murdered Eric, was it better or worse if I did it right after having sex with him?

After a while he asked if I still awake. "No" I said, trying not to sound too grumpy, although I'm not sure Eric was great at picking up when someone was annoyed with him. If he was, then I was pretty sure he wouldn't have been explaining to Sam just how useful knowing the tax regulations were earlier in the evening. It was a speech Sam had had a few times now, and his tolerance levels were diminishing rapidly.

"I can't sleep" Eric said, which wasn't news to me, any more than the usefulness of tax training was to Sam. I waited to see what he'd say next.

"I just keep thinking…do you think they're happy?" he asked.

"Who?" God I hoped he wasn't asking me if he'd pissed off Sam and Tray earlier, because he had and there wasn't a nice way to phrase that. I guess it was part of the territory though. I'd seen similar situations with Dad and Jason and I got the impression he was supposed to drive them up the wall until they moved out. Possibly there was a biological reason for it, but until Sam and Tray realised that, we were all stuck here together.

"Well…all of them" Eric said.

"Oh." That was quite a question for my poor, tired brain. Were they happy? Well, Sam and Tray were pissed off with Eric, Pam was miserable in hospital, Amelia had broken up with her boyfriend and was determined to follow a path I didn't really understand but worried might leave her sad and alone, and Felicia was…probably facing a morning with a hangover about now.

But all of that was fleeting, wasn't it?

"I think so. I mean, we did our best."

"I guess" Eric agreed, and he shuffled around a bit more. I guess though it's like being on a boat and eventually the movement actually rocks you to sleep. Certainly I don't remember anything after that.

EPOV

I couldn't sleep. I was fucking tired, but I couldn't fucking sleep.

I felt bad about Pam. And I felt shitty that I felt bad. And then I started to worry that maybe I hadn't been the best dad to the other kids.

And that really fucking put paid to any sleep.

Sookie seemed to think we'd done the best we could. Sookie was usually right. Although her pretty fucking blatant eagerness to go to sleep was perhaps clouding her thinking just a little.

Maybe she was just saying it to shut me up?

Maybe they all really hated me and secretly wished she'd never met me? Well, Amelia felt like that. The younger ones probably realised that without me they wouldn't have actually existed.

Sam and Pam probably realised that, anyway. When they weren't cursing me for giving them names that fucking rhymed.

That wasn't me though…that was, well. Maybe Sookie could have noticed a little earlier.

Fuck. Maybe I shouldn't have been relying on her judgement quite so much.

After all, she insisted on letting fucking Claude sleep on her pillow. One of these days he'd accidentally smother her, and then I'd be left all alone with a bunch of kids who hated me. And I would have him put down, and not feel the slightest bit of regret about it, because it was all Claude's fucking fault.

I realised that I probably needed some sleep.

I couldn't sleep.

It was a little bit lonely, lying here. By myself. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. And then I rolled onto my side again, and bumped Sookie's back. Mostly accidentally.

She didn't wake up.

I moved just my leg, so it butted into the back of hers. Mostly on purpose. She stirred and started slightly.

"Oh. You're awake too" I said.

"No. Wha? I was…no, I dozed off."

I didn't reply to that. There wasn't a question there anyway. I waited for Sookie to say something else, and hoped she wouldn't go back to sleep. Eventually she spoke.

"So, uh…you can't sleep?"

"Mmm." I thought that was obvious. "I can't believe you didn't realise I wasn't wearing pants before."

"Oh. Um..." There was a very long pause during which time I was worried that maybe Sookie had gone back to sleep again. "You can still surprise me" she said in the end. "Maybe that's where Pam gets it from."

"Were you surprised?"

Sookie sighed. "Yes. No." Well that wasn't a very fucking definitive answer. "I guess maybe it'd always been there, but Pam's sexuality was part of Pam so I didn't bother trying to label it separately."

"I don't think I like the word 'sexuality' in the same sentence as Pam's name" I muttered.

"At least she won't bring home another Rubio" Sookie said, as she tried to adjust her position in bed.

"I'm sure there are women out there who are just as dumb and annoying as he was" I countered.

"Well, there you go. Nothing's changed. You have nothing to worry about. Go to sleep, Eric." It was hard not to miss the pleading tone in Sookie's voice.

It wasn't that hard to pretend I had, though. "I just…" I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to put all the doubts and worries that Pam was going to hate me forever for the way she thought I'd completely rejected her, into words. So I didn't. I just held Sookie tighter.

"Sometimes breathing's nice" Sookie said.

"Sometimes." She was breathing fine. I could hear it. It got significantly louder. She'd gone to sleep again.

I lay there, and tried to do the same.

SPOV

For someone who'd had very little sleep for the last two nights, Eric was up and out of bed quite early the next morning. In fact everyone beat me out of bed, except for Claude who waited, none too patiently, for me to stagger out to the kitchen.

At that point, I realised that the gender balance had completely shifted now Pam wasn't here. I couldn't get to the fridge, I couldn't get to the pantry, I definitely couldn't get near the toaster, and leaving the milk out, on top of the oven, going slowly off and dripping little white drops onto the ceramic surface was just cruel because I couldn't get to that either.

Everywhere there was just a wall of bloody male backs, blocking me. Eventually Eric noticed my predicament. "Tray, just fucking move and let your mother get through" Eric said. I didn't like to point out he was just as bad as the boys were.

"Why are you just standing back there?" Tray asked me, like I'd done something a little bit stupid.

It was pretty mortifying to hear that tone. From Tray.

"I'm trying to get past you guys" I complained. "You're big."

Tray shrugged. "You're little" he pointed out. Well, no. I wasn't. Pam was little, I was normal-sized. It was easier to see that when there was a comparison.

I missed Pam.

"You're not that little" Sam said, as I finally got close enough to remove the milk container and put it in the fridge. It was nice he was sticking up for me. "You know. For a person who's, well…not _that_ tall."

"She's shorter than Leesh" Tray said, as I went back with the cloth to get the milk droplets.

"But not Pam or Amelia" Sam pointed out.

"You know, you're all kind of short…" Tray said, with a grin, before Sam interjected. "Oh, fuck off!" He still wasn't happy with the fact Tray was taller than he was, any more than Eric was. It was wrong as far as they were concerned, and went against the natural order of things.

Tray loved it. "Yeah, but you can fit in that car of yours. No good me getting a hatchback, I'd have to fold in half."

"It's not that small" Sam complained. "And you don't complain when I'm driving you around."

"I don't think _anyone_ should be complaining about a car they didn't have to fucking pay for" Eric grumbled.

Sam sighed, and moved over to the table. I think only I heard him mutter "That fucking tax paper is a fucking high price" under his breath.

"So are you blokes going up to see Pam?" Tray asked Eric and me, with his mouth half-full of Weetbix. Eric winced a bit at the 'blokes' epithet, but didn't say anything.

"I guess" I said, looking over at Eric, who nodded. He handed me some coffee and I said a quick "Thank you" and took a sip.

"Maybe she's scored one of the hot nurses" Tray mused.

"What hot nurses?" Sam asked.

Tray shrugged. "Nurses?" he tried. "You know, those women you couldn't get."

Sam didn't say anything to that; he just glowered into his bowl of cereal.

"The uniforms were kind of hot" Tray mused. "On some of them, anyway. Still, it's not like they were fucking air-hostesses, eh Dad?"

"What?" Eric asked sharply, giving off an air of shut up now or face the consequences. Yeah, that didn't work on Tray.

"They weren't air-hostesses…or, fuck. I don't know, what's the wanky P.C. term for them? Cabin crew? Yeah, you know. Hot chicks in short skirts. Dad knows what I mean."

"Please tell me someone just left him on our doorstep" Sam said to me.

Eric frowned at Tray and didn't answer, but Tray didn't seem worried. He turned to Sam instead. "They were fucking at it again, last night" he said, conversationally.

I felt myself go a bit hot, which, thankfully, wasn't as common an occurrence as it had been for a while there, and snuck a glance at Eric. Eric was closely examining the doorway. I think he was going to make a run for it.

"What?" Sam asked sharply.

"You know" Tray said, waving his spoon around and sending a fine spray of milk everywhere.

"No" Sam said. "I don't understand half of what you say. It's like living with the fucking village idiot."

I don't think Tray had a good comeback to that one. "Yeah. Nah." I looked at Eric, whose grip on the coffee cup had tightened considerably. Yeah, he was going to bolt and take that with him. I'm pretty sure he took a step backwards.

Tray continued on. "You know! Cordy. And Stan. Fighting over Pam's bed. You'd think they'd have more room without her, but they've gone fucking feral now she's not here. Fucking cats."

I breathed a sigh of relief and I'm sure Eric did too. At least he loosened his grip on the cup and I stopped worrying about how long the handle would remain attached.

"So, Pam" Eric announced. "We should go and get ready to head in there." And with that he did leave the kitchen.

PPOV

Hospital totally blows. It's so boring. Nothing happens except all the stuff you don't want to happen, like people who snore all freaking night long. And nurses who shine torches on you at 2am so they can 'check' you. I don't know what they thought they were checking. If they wanted to figure out who was snoring they just had to follow the fucking sound.

Even Tray didn't snore that loud. Even Ivan didn't snore that loud. Or fart as much. God, I hoped I got out of here soon.

At least Dad had been to visit, so that was something. I wished he could have stayed though. Or taken me home. Or bought me some earplugs. Earplugs would be good about now.

When the morning rolled around I got painkillers followed by cold toast and those little packets of Marmite and jam. So that was incredibly not very exciting at all. And I had to really spread the jam thin to make it last for all the toast.

I got a cup of tea.

Life was pretty sad when a cup of tea was the highlight of your morning.

But I got visitors. Mum and Dad turned up, with my iPad, thank God because I was going a bit spare by that point. "I might watch _Hunger Games_ again" I said to Dad.

"You still can't have any real weapons" he replied, as he stared hard at the chair for a while before he sat in it. Mum sat on the end of the bed, but not before she'd fussed for a bit by straightening up the blanket on top of the sheets. She just couldn't help herself, and I honestly didn't care that much about how straight my blanket was.

I mainly cared about going home and getting on with the rest of my life which seemed to be stagnating while I sat here. But Dad talked to the doctor and they wanted to keep me.

"They must like you" Dad said, but he wasn't very funny.

"You're not very funny" I said to him. "I don't want to stay any longer. Can't you just tell them to let me go?"

"No" Dad said, which was kind of un-Dadlike. Normally he liked telling people what to do. I'd figured out that you could tell how much he liked someone by whether he bothered trying to pretend he wasn't telling them what to do. If he didn't care, he didn't bother.

I always kind of liked the fact that he usually tried to pretend he wasn't telling me what to do.

"I think you're better off in here" Dad said, and then he Iooked at the small gap in the curtains around the bed. That was kind of pointless because if he really wanted to leave he could just push through the curtain anywhere.

Odd.

"I'll bring you in some food, if you like. I might make some ginger crunch" Mum said. That wasn't odd.

"It's Leesha who likes the ginger crunch" I pointed out.

"Oh" Mum said. "Oh, well, um…"

"Banana cake?" I suggested. If she was offering, I might as well get what I wanted.

"I like the cream cheese frosting" Dad said, still with one eye on the curtain.

"I don't" I said. Well, the cake was supposed to be for me.

"I might make two cakes" Mum said, sighing. "The boys have been hanging around."

"Don't let Tray eat my cake" I grumbled.

"Tray won't eat your cake" Dad said.

"If you gave me a bow and let me out of hospital, I could make sure of that" I said.

"No" Dad said again, and that was the end of that idea.

When they left, I tried to get comfortable and thought I might watch a movie or something. But then I got more visitors.

"How are you?" Aunty Jude asked. She put an enormous bunch of grapes on the bedside table. I wondered if it would be rude to tell her that it's Amelia who likes grapes, and not me. Being one of five was OK, but no one ever remembered what you liked.

I tried to think it through. Dad might tell her, Mum wouldn't. Probably best to go with Mum's plan about now.

Especially because Thomas was with her. That was really odd. I didn't even really like him; he was kind of a douche. I certainly didn't think he liked me. Mostly he didn't even acknowledge I existed. He was too busy trying to annoy Sam. He annoyed Sam a lot, which was at least a change from Tray annoying Sam.

Still, Thomas had never tied to me to a couch, so he had that in his favour.

"Thanks" I said, looking at the grapes again. I didn't sound very enthusiastic.

"They say it's dreadfully painful. Is it bad?" Aunty Jude asked. Oh, well that would do as an explanation for why I wasn't very enthusiastic. I nodded.

Aunty Jude took the chair and then Thomas was stuck with the end of the bed. He really looked like he didn't want to be there. He kept staring at the curtains, just like Dad had.

If no one else liked being here, how the hell did they think I was doing?

Aunty Jude sighed. "The carpark is just a rabbit warren these days. It's so narrow, and the ramps are two-way so you don't know who's going to be coming at you. Plus that entrance off Grafton Road is awful."

Well that explained why Thomas was here. He'd had to drive her. It was weird she made him do that, I mean, she was only…what? Dad's age? I tried to imagine Dad making Sam drive him everywhere.

Yeah, that wouldn't work. Aunty Jude was clearly a bit nuts. At least I wasn't really related to her, although it felt like I was because she was definitely related to Amelia and Felicia.

My family was complicated.

Aunty Jude chatted. A lot. You could tell she was related to Amelia, because they both wittered on. Thomas didn't say a thing. Probably never had a chance in his life.

"Oh, and Portia sends her love" Aunty Jude said. She did? I didn't really like Portia. I was actually quite glad I wasn't related to her. "She's praying for you."

"Uh-huh." Awesome. I didn't really think she gave two hoots about me, but ever since Nana Lorena had left me her old knitting needles and patterns when she went into the home, Portia had started to notice I was around. Now Nana Lorena was dead, Portia was really funny about always asking after me, like I'd done something special. Weird.

After a while Aunty Jude looked a little restless, which was in contrast to Thomas who'd been remarkably not very restless considering how long he'd had to sit on my bed waiting for his mum to stop talking. If it was Tray sitting there he would have been bouncing around by now, all over my legs, like he did the day before. Even Sam would have found something to do. Thomas just sat there. And waited.

Boy, his life sucked.

Not as much as mine, but still. He didn't seem to be having a lot of fun.

"You know, I might pop up and see India while I'm in here" she said, out of the blue while looking incredibly guilty. It was weird, because it was very much like the look Amelia got when she suddenly did something she'd been planning to do all along. Neither of them were particularly sneaky.

"Is she OK?" I asked. I liked India, who worked with Mum and Aunty Jude. And it wasn't just because she was the first person I'd ever known who actually dated other women, if you didn't count my permanently bi-curious and label-averse older sister.

"Oh. Didn't Sookie say? Gall stones, apparently. Terrible pain from those too. You're all coming down with them."

What? I looked at Aunty Jude. What was she trying to say?

"What?" I asked out loud.

"Oh. Well none of it seems that right, for young people, does it? I suppose India's in her thirties now, but I wouldn't have thought gall stones. Or a kidney stone for you. I wonder if it's the environment?"

I shrugged. Who cared? Sounded like something Amelia would say, and then she'd try to tell me I shouldn't go near anything plastic and act all pious because she remember to take her own cup to buy coffee.

I was just glad Aunty Jude didn't think India and I had been afflicted because we were gay. And the sympathy was nice. I just wish she'd brought me chocolates instead of grapes.

"Um…so I'll just be ten minutes" Aunty Jude said, and then she left. Thomas was still there. Great. How was I supposed to entertain him?

I wondered if maybe Sam and Tray would show up and they could…I didn't know. Too hard.

We just sat there, neither of us saying anything, until eventually Thomas broke the silence. "Do you want anything?" he asked. He'd always managed to talk like a grown-up even when we were kids…well, younger anyway. I said no. I wanted to be left alone, but I also didn't, which was hard to explain and made me seem like a little kid who didn't know her own mind and just wanted everything from everyone.

"So how come you have to drive your mum around?" I asked him in the end. He shrugged. "She likes it."

"You could say no."

Thomas looked at me like I was an idiot. "But I don't mind" he said. "She's not so bad."

I couldn't imagine why he'd want to follow his mum around. Mostly I could imagine what Sam and Tray would think of that. And then I said what they would think of that before I realised what was coming out of my mouth. "You sure you're not gay?"

And then I kicked myself, mentally. Sam and Tray have a lot to answer for, and years of having to hang out with them had left me with some pretty indelible behaviours, what I'd just demonstrated being one of them.

Sam and Tray were definitely poo-heads. And now I felt like one.

"No" Thomas said, although he didn't sound angry. "Are you?"

If I'd actually been Sam or Tray I could have yelled 'fuck off' which was usually their response. But I felt kind of bad. Let's see how this goes, I thought, as I answered. "Yes."

Thomas looked at me, and didn't say anything, which made me a little mad. And then he burst out laughing.

"What?" That wasn't what I'd been expecting.

"Oh. I'm just picturing how busy Aunty Portia's going to be when she finds out."

"Why?"

"Praying for you. You're going to keep her busy for weeks."

He was right. It was kind of funny to picture her. She'd be beside herself. Although, would she? I mean, she wasn't really related to me, was she?

"It's the best thing to happen to the family in a while" Thomas said. "And it might stop her praying for me."

"What about you?"

"Oh. Because I want to join the Navy…so, you know." He looked at the curtain. I could imagine. How was Aunty Jude ever going to cope with that?

"Well, you can tell her. If you want. I mean…they'll all know now." It was kind of scary, but exhilarating at the same time, to finally have it all out in the open. Now that Mum and Dad knew, I could tell anyone I liked.

"You're telling everyone?" Thomas asked.

I shrugged. "I guess so. Well, family anyway…" I waited for him to correct me, and say we weren't family. But he didn't, which was nicer than Tray and Sam who used to tell me I'd been adopted from a family of albino circus acrobats.

"My granddad is gay. He didn't tell anyone" Thomas said. Oh yeah, I'd heard that story. "Mum hates him for that." I definitely hadn't heard that part of the story. I tried to imagine what it would be like to hate your own dad, and, even though Dad had been a real poo-head about me being gay, I still didn't really hate him.

Even when I had to leave Miriam, I didn't really hate him. Although I wished we'd gone to Disneyland to make up for it. I still thought that might have been nice, and I would have stopped making such a fuss if he'd just taken me.

But sometimes you couldn't change Dad…he was just Dad.

Still, I wish I'd known about him nagging Mum to have me. Then I could have said that he had to take me because he got what he wanted so it was only fair. I liked it better when things were fair.

The problem with being the youngest was that nothing ever was.

While I was thinking through all this stuff, Thomas just sat there. I kept waiting for him to talk random shit like Tray did or get restless and go and do something like Sam, but he didn't. Weird.

But it was OK, having Thomas there. He didn't push me around the bed like Tray did, for a start. And when Aunty Jude turned back up I realised I was going to be kind of sorry he was going. I liked the company.

"India's partner's there now" Aunty Jude said. "So I thought I'd leave them to it."

"You know, I'm gay" I blurted out. "Like India…so…" I didn't really have anything to add to that.

Aunty Jude put her bag over her shoulder. "Oh" she said. "Oh! That's not what I meant…before…when I said, about you both getting stones…you know. I'm not Portia!"

"No. I know." Poor Aunty Jude. She looked a bit flustered. "Sorry" I said. "If I shocked you."

"Oh, no. I've had worse. At least you didn't do it like my dad did." She pursed her lips and looked hard, but then she gave up and just shrugged

"Well, we better get going" Aunty Jude said. "You got the car keys?"

Thomas nodded, and then they said goodbye. "Good luck" I said to Thomas and he gave me a small smile as he walked through the curtain, and then I was alone again, with only the world's most enormous bunch of grapes for company.

I looked at the grapes. No, they still didn't appeal. I guess that just came with my genetic makeup, like being gay, and being the palest person on the planet, which was ridiculous given how bad the sun was here.

Amelia would tell me that grapes were full of anti-oxidants and would undo any sun damage to my skin, but Amelia was full of crap like that. Felicia would use them to pelt Sam and Tray with, and that would be more entertaining. I missed Leesh. She was always fun to have around.

I could do with some fun. Or even just entertainment. I was kind of restless.

Also, edible food would be good.

I hoped Mum came back with the cake soon.

I wondered if I should text her.

I hoped Tray hadn't eaten it all.

I hoped Dad brought it in. I wouldn't even mind if he'd made her put the cream cheese frosting on it.

He probably would have, because he seemed to do alright at getting Mum to do stuff.

And I guess I should be thankful for that.

**Thanks for reading!**


	73. Bonus 2: The Third Daughter

**A/N Hello? Anyone there? Yeah, it took a loooong time to write this, and I'm really not liking this work thing for the effect on my writing. Sadly I can't really get out of it now, so fingers crossed the next chapter doesn't take so long. **

**Disclaimer: Well I've barely done anything with them in the last couple of weeks, so I hardly think anyone is going to mind at all :)**

SPOV

Eric was subdued on the way home from the hospital. I think I would have rather had annoying. At least when he was annoying all and sundry I could gauge the level of his upset. When he was quiet I was never quite sure what he was stewing about and I just had to wait it out, which was a very boring pastime and seriously cut down on the opportunity to chat about stuff as I didn't get any response to anything I said.

I was a bit bummed about that. I liked it when it was just Eric and I in the car and we got to chat. Even though the kids had been getting older for a while, and we'd had a bit more time to ourselves, it still felt like a treat when it was just me and Eric and there weren't other people busting into the conversation to tell us how old we were and how our ideas about everything were stink.

So I tried looking out the window, but there wasn't anything I hadn't seen before, and the sun was kind of bright. Outside there was the chill wind you'd expect for winter, but inside the car the sun was warming me up.

Maybe, I thought, I'd just close my eyes for a moment. I was pretty tired still from being up half the night when Pam was admitted. And that sun was glaring.

That made everything slightly more pleasant. That was until Eric nudged me rather hard in the arm. "You can wake up now. We're home."

Well, that seemed a bit rude. And I hadn't been asleep anyway. "I wasn't asleep."

"I don't know what your definition of asleep is, Sookie, but I think it was the snoring that was the real giveaway."

Oh, good. I was back to having an annoying Eric, which was nicer than a silent one. Except that he got out of the car and disappeared into the house before I could really have much of a conversation with him.

I hoped he wasn't going to try to have a conversation with the boys. I wasn't sure how much they'd appreciate it just at the moment.

But he didn't. He went into his office and shut the door. I went to the kitchen to start on the cake I'd promised Pam. "You know, Aud" I said to her, as she was trying very hard to blend into her surroundings. She didn't look at all like a ship in a bottle, though, so it was quite obvious that it was her on the kitchen windowsill and not some random cat-shaped ornament. "I don't think he likes that he can't control what's going on at the hospital. It's driving him a bit bonkers. You remember what it was like."

I think Aud nodded. After all, she probably did remember the mayhem that had been caused by her offspring, and Eric's constant refrain of 'the kittens stay in the laundry'. Trouble was no one explained that to the kittens, and they were fascinated by the whole world outside the laundry which was full of interesting things to eat, chew, shred and pee on. Most of them seemed to be located in Eric's office and it didn't matter how many times Eric delivered the lecture on not shredding his very important pieces of paper, the kittens didn't care. Eric's frustration with them all was plain to everyone but the kittens themselves, who organised escape committees on a regular basis despite the ranting and raving that occurred when their sorties were discovered.

I suspected that after a while they just thought it was background noise. And it only seemed to encourage them, leading Eric to come up with more elaborate schemes to keep them where they were supposed to be, and the kittens to be more determined to escape. He couldn't win, not when it was six against one and no sooner had he captured one small escapee, when another three would make a break for it and chase Stan down the hallway, or climb the living room curtains to see what was at the top, or attempt to follow Ivan outside. I was half-surprised the kittens didn't end up on very short chains.

It didn't matter how many cardboard box gates we constructed, or how many interesting, catnip-filled toy mice we purchased, the laundry was never going to cut it as far as the kittens were concerned.

And I suspected that Pam being in hospital had the opposite effect on Eric. If he could, he would have broken her out. He just couldn't guarantee that she'd be OK if he did that, and it was killing him.

"Why are you talking to Cordy?" Tray asked me.

"I wasn't. And that's Aud."

"Well the cats all look the same to me."

No they didn't. Aud wasn't fluffy, Claude was. Cordelia had some white and tabby blotches. Stan was orange. Eddie was grey. And fat. It was like saying the kids all looked the same.

"Are you baking?" Tray asked me.

"Mmm" I said, hoping to throw him off the scent, but probably failing miserably. The mixing bowl in front of me was a dead giveaway for a start.

Tray started poking around in the pantry anyway; I heard some rustling, a muttered "Just fucking move, Ivan" and then the beeping of the microwave being set. I hustled to get my cake mixed before Tray decided to appropriate the bowl for licking prior to me actually getting any cake mix into the cake tin. But he seemed otherwise occupied.

After a while curiosity got the better of me. "What are you doing?" I asked him.

"Carbo loading" Tray said, as he sat down at the table with a plate of tiny potatoes. He picked one up and took a bite. "Hof!" he said, but he kept on eating.

I wasn't a hundred per cent certain Tray really needed to be carb loading. "Are you sure about that?" I asked.

"You have no idea how much fuel it takes to keep me going." Tray stood up and walked to the pantry, and came back with the bottle of soy sauce, sprinkling some all over his potatoes before sitting down and picking up another one. "Still hof!" he said.

Well I did have an idea how much food it took to keep him going. I seemed to spend half my life making that food, shopping for it, and occasionally stopping Eric asking the boys to reimburse our credit card when everything got very expensive.

But at least he was occupied and not asking about lunch. For the four minutes it took him to eat the potatoes anyway. I put the mixing bowl down in front of him so he could scrape the dregs of the mix out. "When's lunch?" he asked.

"Soon…ish."

"Good, I'm kind of peckish" Tray said, eschewing the spoon and digging out banana cake mix with his hand. "Are you making the icing out of cream cheese?" he asked.

"Haven't decided." And at that point Eric entered the kitchen. I waited to see what was coming next.

"Why is it that no one else ever thinks it's a good idea to make a cup of coffee around here? Why is that always me? Everyone's happy to fucking drink the coffee, but no one ever thinks to make any." There wasn't really an answer to that little tirade. For one thing, no one else was ever game to touch the coffeemaker, and, if we did, you could pretty much guarantee Eric was going to swoop in to check that what we were doing was OK. He had a sixth sense about these things, just like Ivan had a sixth sense abut when there was meat around and how Sam had a sixth sense about there being left-over cake mix.

"How come Tray got it all?" he asked.

"You weren't here."

"That's not fair."

"Mate, you snooze, you lose" Tray said licking his fingers with relish.

Sam looked at me, and I hoped that really, I didn't have to have the discussion over the correct way to apportion the bowl for licking once again. I'd been having that conversation for years. There was no way to do it so someone didn't feel hard done by, apart from maybe licking the bowl myself. In secret. Maybe by hiding in the pantry to do it.

Luckily Sam's phone rang and I got out of that one. He answered and then walked out of the room to talk on it.

"But it's OK, because, fuck knows, I'm here to make it" Eric said, loudly, at which point I realised none of us had actually responded to Eric's little rant about the coffee, which wasn't actually about the coffee at all, and mostly about Pam being in hospital.

"And we do appreciate it" I said, as I peered at the cake in the oven.

Tray placed the now-empty bowl on the bench with a clatter and sloped out of the room, leaving his plate on the table as well. Claude took the opportunity to jump up on the table and sample soy sauce. He didn't seem to hate it.

"And yet, I don't get to the lick the bowl" Eric said, as he handed me a cup. I hoped he was joking about that one. I was sympathetic, but I didn't need all three of them fighting over a bowl.

He turned his attention to Claude next though. "Fucking get off the table, Claude!" Eric shouted, and, for once, Claude actually turned his head to look at Eric. He didn't get off the table, but he'd at least acknowledged he was being spoken to.

That was progress.

Eric picked Claude up and put him on the floor before moving Tray's plate to the sink. He sipped his coffee and stared at the ship in the bottle while Aud remained very still. She needn't have worried. She was unlikely to get the same treatment as Claude, even if she'd been lapping the coffee up from around the coffee maker.

Sam came back into the room muttering to himself. "I'm not even working tonight" he said. "And I still have to sort out the roster because Andrea can't work." He sighed. I thought that he mostly liked his job, and liked the fact they let him manage the Burger Wisconsin franchise at the weekends, but he struggled with the staff, who all seemed to be teenage girls prone to dumping Sam in it if they got a better offer from their boyfriends. While I think he enjoyed the money, he could have done without working quite so often to cover everyone else.

"I might give it up" Sam announced. "And become a barista."

"Oh, good. Well you can fucking feel free to practice that skill any time you like" Eric said, and Sam gave him a highly sceptical look. Yeah, like anyone would really be allowed to touch the coffeemaker.

Tray came in again; probably judging that by now lunch should have been ready. I hadn't really got that far yet, I was in the process of removing the cake from the oven. "Can I have some?" Tray asked.

"Not unless you want mouth blisters" I warned, although I probably needed to give him stronger warnings. Tray didn't look like he thought that was a bad thing.

Eric stepped closer to the cake as though he was going to protect it. It was a nice thought, but I wasn't sure he was actually protecting it for Pam's sake, as much as for his own. Especially when he said "You can't really eat it until the frosting is on there anyway. It's better with the cream-cheese frosting."

"It's icing" Sam muttered. "And I really think the consulate might work."

"Why have you got your undies in a twist?" Tray asked him.

"Oh, fucking work. If I can't find a replacement for Andrea I'll have to work tonight."

"Nah, that's not on. You shouldn't have to fill in just 'cos she can't get her act together."

Sam considered that. At least I assumed that's what the pause in the conversation was. I was watching Eric watch the cake, and occasionally watch Tray to measure his proximity to the cake. It wasn't a very productive way for us to be spending our time.

We should have been watching Claude. He glided up onto the kitchen bench next to the cake and got short shrift when Eric pushed him back off with a "Fuck-off, Claude."

You had to hand it to Claude for being resilient.

"Is this just because you want me to take you to that party?" Sam asked Tray.

"No…but you know…" Tray said. Sam clearly did know because he gave his brother the same sceptical look he'd given Eric just before. "It might be nice if I did take you?" he asked Tray.

"Well you wanted to go" Tray accused. "And I said I'd pay for the beer."

"Which I can't drink if I'm driving."

"Fuck, you're just Mr Negativity, aren't you? Maybe you should go to work?"

"Is this your attempt at reverse psychology? Because, I hate to tell you, you're shit at it."

"Fuck. I am not the bad guy because I think you should have some fun. It's not my fault you want to be a miserable arsehole." With that, Tray walked out of the room.

Well, that had been mildly entertaining. For some of us, anyway. Eric had even managed to stop watching the cake for a few minutes there, which wasn't his smartest move, because behind his back Aud had stretched out a paw and was silently trying to step down onto the bench to take her tithe; all those weeks of living off Eric's muffin discards had left her with a taste for baking.

"No!" I hissed, and she stepped back onto the windowsill, the whole incident having been missed by Eric who was still focussed on Sam.

"Maybe you should go" Eric said, and Sam looked at him, but didn't say anything for a moment. After a while he said "Maybe. Depends. I dunno. I…should…maybe I can get someone else." And then he walked out of the kitchen.

Eric looked at me. "What?" he asked, sharply. "I can be the supportive parent, too, you know." Yeah. He could. He just didn't usually send them out partying. "Tray's right" Eric said. "Some fun might be good."

I was so gobsmacked by the concept of something Tray said being right, that I didn't for a moment wonder whether Eric was talking about himself or Sam. And then he left the kitchen anyway.

"No, Aud. Fun is not eating the banana cake I made for Pam. You put that paw right back where it was."

PPOV

The problem with being in hospital, well, one of the problems if you discounted the pain, the lack of privacy and the god-awful smell, was that you were left with time to do nothing but think. And maybe worry.

Worrying really sucked.

I would have liked to worry about myself. I felt that I should be worrying about myself. But instead I ended up worrying about Dad, and whether it really would be OK when I got home.

So that felt totally wrong. It should have been the other way around.

And I guess I was trying to understand what had happened. I mean, Dad had just...well, blind-sided me when he'd been so upset about me being gay. Like I'd betrayed him, or something. I hadn't really expected that. I'd expected grumpiness, swearing, even shouting. But not him cutting himself off from me.

I felt like I'd had him all wrong. How could someone you'd known your whole life not be the person you thought he was?

After Thomas and Aunty Jude left it was really, really boring. Until Amelia turned up.

"I was going to go to the gym" she informed me. "But I thought I'd better come here. Oooh, you've got grapes."

Yeah, I think that was code for didn't want to go to the gym, didn't have anyone else to hang out with, knew I couldn't get away from her.

"Have one" I said to Amelia, as she tried to stuff about three grapes in her mouth. She didn't even look all that embarrassed. I guess even though she liked to pretend she was above the whole 'grab it while it's there' mentality that seemed to be our family motto, she'd been indoctrinated like the rest of us.

That might be another thing we could blame Tray and Sam for. God knows, if you didn't eat it, they'd snaffle it up, and maybe fight each other over it like a pair of dogs with a bone.

"Aunty Jude brought them" I said to Amelia, as she went back for more grapes.

"That was nice of her."

"Mmm." We didn't talk for a bit, Amelia kept eating the grapes though. It was nice they were being appreciated. I wondered if Mum was going to come back with the banana cake.

I tried to think of something to talk to Amelia about. It wasn't usually this hard because she'd blather on about herself at length. But she'd been a lot quieter recently.

"So…how's work?" I tried. That was normally what Mum asked her. That was what Mum asked a lot of people. Maybe Mum didn't really want to know the answer; she just felt she should ask.

I wondered if Mum ever got bored sticking to all the rules she lived by. I wondered if she ever got fed up that Dad didn't. I don't think I'd ever heard him ask anyone how work was going.

"Oh…it's alright" Amelia said. "You know."

Not really, but I possibly didn't care enough to ask her to elaborate. Instead my mind had wandered elsewhere entirely. How the hell had my parents ended up together?

"What do you remember?" I asked Amelia.

"About?" she asked me, half-way to putting another grape in her mouth. Jeez, it was probably a good thing they hadn't brought me in any chocolates.

Not that Amelia was fat. And I'd never tell her she was fat. And she wasn't fat. She was just bigger than I was. I'd been eating two doughnuts every morning for a while now, and I still hadn't put on any weight. It was a bit depressing because I really, really, really wanted to not be an A cup anymore. Amelia was always complaining that she only had to put on half a kilo and she was pushing it to fit a C cup anymore. I don't know why I couldn't have got that gene.

"When, you know…Dad arrived."

"Arrived where?" Amelia asked.

"Here. With Mum."

"Oh. Oooh. Well…" Amelia gathered her thoughts, and another handful of grapes for good measure. "I was very sad, of course, because my first dad had died…"

"Yeah, yeah. But what about Dad. Do you remember?"

"Um…" Amelia looked thoughtful. I guess this was the least-rehearsed part of the story.

"You must remember something."

"I'm thinking!" Amelia sounded grumpy. I let her think. She thought for a long while and the bunch of grapes was getting quite depleted. "You know… I remember something…I think…well. I remember the zoo."

"The zoo?"

"Yeah. I'm sure we went to the zoo."

"With Dad?"

"Yeah. Must have been when they were dating, I guess. You know, the first time he got to meet her kids. That sounds about right."

"Yeah. I guess. I mean…it sounds right, doesn't it? That you'd invite your boyfriend to meet your kids…although that sounds kind of weird. I mean, you know, to think of Dad as Mum's _boyfriend_."

"Yeah, but he must have been. At some point. I mean…I don't really remember when they were dating."

"You don't?"

"No" Amelia mused. "So I guess a lot of the time they must have gone out alone."

"Oh. Where did you go?"

"Dunno. Nana's maybe? I mean, I remember she used to let me hold the wool."

"Did she? You were lucky."

"Yeah…I miss her" Amelia said. "She was a tough old thing, and kind of mean to people she didn't like, but I liked her anyway."

"Me too." I did miss her, weirdly. Even though I wasn't even related to her.

My family was complicated.

"Do you think it's weird, though? That, like, Dad came all this way? And stayed? For Mum?" I asked.

"And for me" Amelia said huffily. "He must have liked me too."

"Well, and Leesh then, too." Amelia looked like she wanted to argue that one. "She was just a baby. She doesn't even remember" she said, scathingly.

"Mmm. But is it weird? To want to do that?"

"If he hadn't, you wouldn't be here" Amelia pointed out.

"Well…yeah, but…" It was odd to contemplate that. It wasn't quite where I was going with this, though. I didn't really fancy Amelia as the ghost of Christmas past for one thing. She'd be far too dramatic about it and steal the whole show. "I mean, like, to just chuck everything in and move to the other side of the world…who does that?"

Amelia sighed. "Well if you don't know them, it sounds quite romantic, I guess. Like something in a book."

"But we do know them."

"Yep." That seemed to be the end of Amelia's thoughts on the matter. I wasn't so sure. I didn't really know them, that was the problem. They were just Mum and Dad and yet…they'd had this big romance…at some point. Hard to imagine it though. They weren't really romantic people. They were slightly gropey at times they shouldn't be people. I couldn't really imagine Dad…doing that, for someone else.

Dad was just a mystery really. I thought of him as…I don't know. A constant. He was always there. Shouting at someone, or sitting in his office muttering and swearing and piling up pieces of paper in neat piles that used to fascinate me when I was little and I wanted to grow up and makes piles of things too. In places where my huge brothers weren't going to come along and knock them all over, which was what happened to Dad's piles on a regular basis.

How come Dad wanted to live with so many people if they all just pissed him off? And why did he push to have another baby when there were so many already? I'd been half-wondering that since he told me about having to nag Mum for a baby the night before. Dad didn't really seem like the nagging kind, more the executive decision maker around the house.

Maybe he really, really wanted a girl that was his?

Wow. Now I wasn't sure if I felt special or bad for Amelia and Felicia. Maybe it wasn't a great idea to think too much about this stuff.

But I was curious and had nothing else to do in here but think. And no one else to ask but Amelia.

"Did you all hate me when I was born?"

"What? No. Why?"

I shrugged. "Just because."

"No. You were really cute. You were the first one I kind of liked. Felicia just sucked. _Literally_ sucked. I had a Barbie that was never the same after she got her mitts on it. Saliva does terrible things to nylon hair. The boys were all noisy and horrible. You were sweet." She patted my arm. Probably the wrong sister to ask. Amelia thought I was some kind of pet kitten or something.

I wondered if Felicia would think that was an odd question if I texted it to her?

I gave up worrying about it all. "Want to hang around for a bit?" I asked Amelia.

"Could do" Amelia said, as though she was doing me a great favour. She'd got a free snack of grapes out of me, so I didn't think she was that put-upon.

"We could watch an episode of _Buffy_?" I suggested. "I've got some on my iPad."

"Oh, you still like that?" Amelia said, like she'd given up such juvenile things. I knew she hadn't, though. I nodded. "I guess" she conceded.

She sat next to me on the bed and we watched the screen. "I always wanted to look like her" Amelia said, at one point. "You know, Cordelia."

"Mmm. I'd kind of like to date her" I agreed. "She's quite hot."

"That's true. Still, you did name your cat after her, so I guess it was always obvious you fancied her. If you were paying attention."

Well, no. I hadn't. That was the problem; no one was paying attention to me for a long time. And now that it was all out in the open I discovered that the book of Dad was even more complex than _King Lear_ had been when we'd done it at school.

"Of course, when I was your age, I didn't have a fancy iPad" Amelia announced. "I only had a phone…a really old phone. And a laptop that used to be Dad's. You're very spoiled, of course. I guess the baby always is."

_King Lear_ had been right about one thing. It did kind of suck to be the third daughter sometimes.

**Thanks for reading!**


	74. Bonus 2: Weird

**A/N Yay, back again. Have managed to tear myself away from the toddler whose favourite phrase is "Look at me, Mummy! Look at me!" Trying to explain that you can't look because you're driving a car doesn't cut it at all :)**

**So we're almost at the end now - I think (but don't quote me) there'll be one more chapter after this.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine.**

EPOV

Everyone was fucking grumpy. And they'd decided to aim that grumpiness at me, which was just fucking charming. I hadn't done anything, for a start.

Even Aud didn't seem to want to make eye contact with me. She just stared pointedly at the ship in a bottle, which I liked to look at too, but I had the feeling she was trying to ignore me.

No one seemed to appreciate me at home. Not one fucking person. As far as Sookie was concerned, the fact I made the coffee was just a given. It might be an interesting experiment to cut her off, but I wasn't sure I wanted to face a Sookie suffering caffeine addiction.

And so I stood and watched the cake, because, fuck knows, I seemed to have all the shit jobs around here and keeping Tray away from the cake was a really shit job. He was fucking determined when he wanted to be, and it was a lot easier when he'd been smaller because I could just push him away like I did with Claude. Sneakiness didn't seem to be a skill Tray had been born with and he was much fonder of full-frontal attacks. But these days…fuck.

It was fucking wrong having children who were bigger than you were.

We were probably lucky that Tray's attention turned to Sam and the fact of the party, or not going to the party, or, possibly, just losing his ride to the party. He did fucking seem to expect Sam to act as a chauffeur all the time, but then, Sam let him get away with it.

Although I guess Sam didn't have much hope of pushing him out of the car, any more than I really had a hope of keeping him away from the cake if he launched at it. I guess we all had shit jobs, and driving Tray around, and making sure he didn't end up face down on the sidewalk in a pool of his own vomit when he'd had too much to drink, was Sam's job.

Poor fucking Sam.

So maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if they did go to that party. Sam could probably do with a night out, after studying for that tax course he took. Plus I really didn't like the idea of Tray going out by himself. He just…well, fuck. He was kind of impulsive.

I just didn't think that it was fair of Sookie to act like I'd never suggested any of the kids have any fun. I wasn't that bad, was I?

It didn't really matter anyway. I had stuff to do.

Except that I didn't. I went into my office and I stared at the blank laptop screen. Everyone else seemed to be busy. Sookie had the cake. Probably lunch. I hoped lunch was soon. Sam was busy re-organising the shift schedule for the Burger Wisconsin in Mt Eden. Tray was…fuck, who knew with Tray? Possibly trying to sneak back into the kitchen to get the cake.

No one much cared what I was doing, that was for fucking sure.

I missed Pam. Not that she hung out with me all the time these days. When she'd been tiny she'd always be in here, with that fucking little pink teapot that played annoying little songs, making me drink endless cups of tea and trying to touch everything she could get her chubby little hands on. Any piece of paper was a target, and if I had a few in a pile then she'd be drawn to them as quick as fucking anything and they'd be everywhere before I could fucking blink.

I missed those days. We'd understood each other back then, Pam and me. Now…fuck. Now I was struggling, in the same way I was struggling to understand why Tray was so fucking big. And loud. And fucking annoying.

I didn't understand much these days.

SPOV

I hid the cake in the pantry and thought about lunch. Mostly I thought about how I was bored of being the one who had to think about lunches all the time. It was a very boring occupation, worse than watching Eric watch the cake.

So then I thought about Eric. Or, more specifically, what Eric had said before he left the kitchen. It wasn't that I didn't think he was the fun parent. Sometimes, out of the two of us, he'd been the most fun one. Especially if the fun in question had been water-pistol fights in the hallway.

And he'd always been up for doing something spontaneous with the kids. If I said I was over cooking, let's get fish and chips or Subway and go and have dinner at the beach or the park he was right on-board with that. I'd never had to justify why I didn't feel like slaving away in the kitchen or why I wanted to spend the money on take-away food. He'd been on my side. And I was on his side, wasn't I? Because he'd looked at me like I'd betrayed him.

"He knows, doesn't he Aud?" I said out loud, but Aud just ignored me and looked out the window at a fixed spot at the back of the garden. God knows what she thought she could see there.

I started flicking through the newspaper that was sitting on the table. It was old-fashioned, but I still liked having a whole paper to look through, rather than just scrolling through things on a screen. After a while I heard Eric come in, but I didn't turn around. He came over to where I was standing, and leaned right up against me, reading over my shoulder. It was annoying and endearing all at once.

There was a lot of stuff that Eric did that could be put in both those categories.

I flipped over to the pages with the recipes. "That looks nice" Eric said, pointing to the fancy sandwiches they were showing. More specifically he pointed to a prosciutto and celeriac Waldorf salad sandwich which caught his eye.

"I was thinking plain old bacon sandwiches for lunch" I informed him.

"Oh." He didn't add anything to that. But I turned around and hugged him anyway.

"I think I can cope with the disappointment" Eric said, a little gruffly. I didn't respond. It was hard work trying to pretend we were talking about something else all the time. My poor brain was fuzzy round the edges from missing sleep as it was, and far, far too taken up with mundane things like worrying about keeping Tray away from the cake, and whether Sam was working too hard. Sometimes it was just easier to say it with a hug.

Well, that sounded like a greeting card. My poor brain was clearly not capable of great insight at the moment.

I made the sandwiches, and the smell of the bacon brought the boys, and Ivan, pretty quickly. There was a split down the family though, when I served them up. Eric decided that he might have a BLT, and managed to adopt a fairly pious expression while cutting up his tomato. Sam decided to have his the same way. Tray and I opted for brown sauce, like my mother would have made them, although Tray added mayonnaise as well, which made all of us pull faces, because no matter how much Tray insisted it tasted really good, it looked pretty disgusting.

Although Ivan wasn't complaining about it and was pretty quick to snaffle up what Tray threw to him.

Lunch over I was left alone to clean up, and ice the cake. Well, almost alone. Eric hovered. "No cream cheese?" he asked, idly.

"Mmm. No."

"And only one cake?"

"Well I didn't have a lot of bananas. Tray keeps muttering about how much fuel it takes to keep him going."

"Fuck. We really need to start charging him more to live here. He doesn't realise how good he's got it."

Still, that didn't stop him doling out cash to the boys when they were about to head off to the party. "Beer money" he said, as he gave some to Tray.

"Sweet!"

"And, uh…you can take that towards the gas" Eric said, as he handed some more to Sam. Sam eyed it. "So basically that's bring Tray home safely money?"

"Think of it as a recognition for your…uh, unstinting loyalty."

Sam looked down at the money he was holding. "If he pukes in the car, I'm fucking pushing him out."

It was nice for the boys they were reaping the benefits of Eric's guilt about Pam. I hoped they appreciated it.

And then Eric and I went back to the hospital to take Pam her cake. Well half a cake. "She probably doesn't need the whole thing" Eric had pointed out to me.

I guess his guilt was only going to take him so far.

EPOV

I still hated hospitals. I really did. I didn't understand them, didn't know what the hell was going on, and it just wasn't a happy to place to be.

Pam didn't look happy either. "I'm so bored" she moaned, with a mouthful of cake.

"Didn't Amelia come in?" Sookie asked, as she refolded a blanket and then moved to pour more water into Pam's glass from the jug sitting next to it.

"Mmm, but, you know. She just ate all my grapes and wasn't that much fun."

"Who brought the grapes?" I asked.

"Oh, Aunty Jude."

"Well, that was nice she came" Sookie commented. "She said she'd try and pop in."

"Yeah…she brought Thomas. He's still a bit of a doofus. Oh, and she went to see India…did you know she's in here?"

"I did" Sookie said. "I should probably nip up and see her too." She looked back in the direction of the door to the room.

"Oh, go on then" Pam said with a sigh.

"I'll only be a tick" Sookie said, and then she left us. Pam turned to me, and I waited for her to say something, or complain that she was bored or, worse, ask to come home. I really fucking hoped she didn't ask that, I didn't want to disappoint her and say no. There'd been a reason I'd had endless fucking cups of pretend tea out of that pink teapot, and a lot of it had to do with the way Pam's big blue eyes would look at me hopefully, and then when I said yes, her whole face lit up. Every fucking time.

But Pam didn't say anything. She just kept looking at me. "What?" I asked.

"You get really grumpy" she said, but it didn't sound like an accusation, more a comment. I didn't say anything to that. "But you live with so many people."

"Not as many as I used to."

"Mmm." Pam thought for a moment. "And you think we're foreign. And weird. And you keep telling us we use all the wrong terms and I was eight before I figured out if I used a 'u' all my teachers would stop telling me I was spelling colour wrong."

"Your mother is foreign. Who nips anywhere? And why is it a tick? And what the fuck is that sauce she puts in her bacon sandwiches?" Even after all these years, there were just some things that were completely fucking odd.

"I'm not foreign?"

"You have your moments. All of you do. Fuck, Tray talks an entirely separate language sometimes. I'm not even convinced anyone else here speaks it with him. I think he makes it up."

"Mmm" Pam replied, and she kept looking at me for a while. "But you still like him?"

"Who? Tray?"

"Well…yeah. I mean, you know. He's _Tray_. He pisses us all off."

"Mostly Sam, who has had to escort him to some party tonight so he can get shitfaced and refuse to get out of bed in the morning."

"Are you going to go in and open all the curtains and make Ivan pant on his face?" Pam asked, with barely disguised glee.

"Possibly. Why all the interest in Tray?" I wasn't really sure why she suddenly cared so much about what her brother was up to. He seemed to run in a pack with a bunch of boys of similar tastes and nothing they did was that exciting to anyone other than them, and it wasn't anything that 18 year old boys hadn't been doing since I was one.

"Oh, nothing. Just, you know. I don't have much else to do but think."

"Well…do some homework."

Pam sighed. "It's the holidays. I don't have any."

"Really?" That sounded wrong. Her fucking school was far too lenient. You would think there should be something. Unless…"This isn't a project, is it? On your family?"

"No." Pam said, sounding surprised. "No. I was just thinking was all."

Well that was never fucking good. If any of them thought too much about their siblings you could guarantee it was because they thought they'd missed out somewhere. Clearly Pam was worried about what was going on at home without her. "They miss you" I said.

"Who?"

"Sam. And Tray."

Pam looked a bit sceptical at that. I was pretty sure they missed her. After all, the house really wasn't the same without her. I'd found that today. Even though I didn't really see her all that often on a Saturday because she was busy with homework or her friends or just shut in her room listening to music and yelling at anyone who approached her bedroom door in case they might think about actually trying to open it.

But it was nicer when Pam was there. It just was. And I'm sure everyone else felt that. Sookie had been very off, and she'd been looking for comfort with that hug before lunch, I could tell.

Pam shrugged at that. She took another piece of banana cake and held the container out to me. I was pretty sure if she was offering, it was OK to take one piece.

Sookie came back and updated us all on the health of the woman she worked with, India. "She says it's no fun being in hospital" Sookie announced.

"I've been saying that!" Pam cried. "But no one believes you when you're a teenager. Everyone thinks I'm being over-dramatic. I think that even Amelia thought I was being dramatic, and, really, that's like Tray thinking I'm greedy. Deeply insulting."

"No one thinks you're making it up" Sookie assured her. "But, you know, I think it's the same for everyone. No one's having a really great time when they're in hospital."

Pam rolled her eyes at that.

We stayed with Pam for a while longer while Sookie updated her on what was happening at home. "You nearly didn't get the banana cake" she said.

"No, but I was keeping my eye on Tray, so it was OK" I added.

"Mmm. Because Tray was the one who got closest" Sookie said, and I had no fucking clue what that meant. I was protecting the cake, not trying to eat it.

I might have actually appreciated being able to lick the bowl of course. I'm sure Pam felt the same.

SPOV

Eric just wasn't great at sitting around beside hospital beds. I felt sorry for Pam. He looked a little uncomfortable the whole time he was there and I'm sure she thought it was to do with her. It really wasn't.

The nurse turned up with some painkillers and Eric asked her a string of questions about what was happening, most of which she seemed to answer with a variation on 'we're waiting to see what happens'. That answer didn't appeal to Eric, who went in search of a doctor.

I stayed with Pam. "Do you think he's found someone to boss yet?" Pam asked me.

"Who? Eric? Possibly." I wondered if the doctors would let someone just come in and boss them. There was always the possibility that Eric could just wear someone down with the sheer force of his determination to have them see it his way. Eventually most people caved in.

"He doesn't really boss you" Pam said to me.

"What? Well, no. That would be weird." Also annoying, and grounds for divorce. Or murder. Depended on what else I had going on and whether my back garden contained a handy readymade hole or not at the time.

"Sometimes he bosses me" Pam grumbled.

"Mmm. That's called parenting." They all thought they knew it all at this age. They didn't. None of us did. I think that's what Amelia was finding out, that everything she thought she was going to have wasn't quite what it seemed. I worried about her. "It's because we worry" I said.

"I thought it was called executive decision making."

"Only when he wants to decide what biscuits to buy. And when he wants to get us all to call them cookies. I'm not calling them cookies when they're actually biscuits."

"Yeah…but. I dunno. Was your dad like that?" Pam asked, which was a little odd. None of the kids really asked much about my parents, given they'd never had the chance to meet them. Sure, they liked to ask me about the 'olden days' and sometimes seemed astounded by the fact there were television sets and indoor plumbing, even in the 1970's, but nothing this specific. Not usually anyway.

"Um…I guess. I was always…well. Jason went first." That was one way to put it.

"He was in trouble all the time?"

"I guess. He got yelled at a lot by Dad, for just…oh God. Everything. Jason just didn't think things through."

"Like Tray?"

"Worse."

"God. That is bad. And yet…he's kind of a grown-up now."

"Well of course he is. And one day, you know, Tray'll get there."

"Uh-huh." Pam sounded sceptical. "So your dad liked you better than Uncle Jason?"

"I guess it was different. I mean, he only had the two of us. And I was the girl…and, you know, in comparison to Jason I was really very good. Not much trouble. So Dad was alright. I did used to like hanging out with him." It was hard to remember now, which made me sad. They'd been dead a long time, my parents, and I was now older than either of them had ever been.

"It must be easier with two kids" Pam mused.

"Just different." There wasn't much I could do about having five kids now. And I doubted that if she thought about it, Pam really wanted to wish herself not here.

Eric came back. "Monday" he said. "Monday they'll do a review. I don't think there's anyone senior here at the weekend."

Pam sighed. "So much for the ball" she grumbled.

I patted her hand. "You'll be out by then. It'll all be over." I hoped that was true.

On the way home Eric and I stopped for dinner at the Thai restaurant in the village. It was nice, with it being just the two of us, even if Eric was a little preoccupied.

"I feel bad for eating Pam's favourite meal" he said. "When she's stuck with hospital food."

"Yeah" I agreed. There wasn't much else to say to that.

We went home and Eric sighed and huffed and looked around as though he'd lost something, but I'd already done the mental cataloguing of where he'd put all his belongings and, as far as I could tell, they were all piled up on the kitchen bench, so they weren't lost. Eric's actions seemed familiar. Probably because I'd seen him scratching around for his stuff more than a few times by now.

Claude wasn't lost either, because he kept following me around trying to grab the bottom of my jeans. "I did feed you. Earlier. You just forget" I said to him, but I don't think he was buying it. He flicked his tail and wandered off. And then it occurred to me, I knew where I'd seen Eric's actions before.

Aud. Aud had been like that when we'd rehomed most of her kittens. She'd even come down off the windowsill to poke around in a few corners, and she couldn't settle anywhere. Sure we'd still had Claude. And Cordelia. But she still wondered about the other ones.

For a little while anyway. And then she forgot about them.

I wonder how long before Eric would forget about Pam. It wasn't something I really wanted to put to the test.

We watched some TV and I might have been dozing a little when we heard the front door open and a lot of stomping and muttering, followed by the sound of Tray saying "Just shut the fuck up about it."

The weird thing was that Eric perked up a little at that. I could tell because up until that point, he'd been doubling as my pillow, but I got jostled as he sat up and reached for the remote to turn the sound down. "What's happening?" he called out,

"The usual" Sam said, as he walked into the living room. "Tray's a fucking moron."

"You talk such fucking shit" Tray said behind him. Well, it was nice he wasn't drunk. Might have been nicer if he wasn't quite so grumpy.

"You do such stupid shit" Sam retorted.

"Nah. Nah. Not my fault. She just couldn't take a joke." Tray scowled at Sam.

"What did you do?" Eric asked.

"Nothing! I didn't do anything."

"Except move that car" Sam said.

"Except…that wasn't _just _me. You know, there were a few of us that did it…" Tray looked thoughtful. "But I didn't know she couldn't take a fucking joke."

"I don't think she thought it was funny" Sam informed him. "I could tell. From the yelling. And the pointing at you. Although the fact you'd picked up her car and moved it around the corner wasn't the thing that made her the angriest with you. Which I do find fucking surprising."

"No. Well I said, she was wrong, and we couldn't have damaged the axle or anything. We just picked it up." Tray looked at us. "It's only a shitty little hatchback, Daihatsu or something. It only took a few of us to move it. As a _joke_." Tray sighed.

"It isn't really very funny" I said. I would be a little bit annoyed if I thought my car had gone missing.

"She doesn't know anything about cars. You can't break a car just by picking it up" Tray said. "That made her all shitty. If she just understood how cars are actually made, she would have been sweet."

"What was the thing that really made her angry?" Eric asked. Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that bit.

"Oh, um…well…" Tray said, as he stared at the floor.

"It was what he said to her" Sam informed us. "During the yelling. Well, at the beginning where there was mostly pointing and not yelling. After he opened his big mouth, then it was all over." Sam sniggered, he was really enjoying this. "Squadron leader, my fucking arse. More like a lame duck." Tray glared at Sam.

"What did he say?" Eric asked.

"Are you gonna tell them?" Sam asked Tray, with a big grin on his face.

"I didn't say anything fucking bad!" Tray complained. "You make it sound like I'm a fucking pervert or something."

"Nah. Just a fucking moron."

"It can't have been that bad" I said. I hoped it wasn't, anyway.

"Oh, fuck. Alright. All I said…_all_ I fucking said was that I liked her!" Tray yelled.

"Nah. You didn't say that. I was there."

"Oh, fuck off Sam. It's what I meant. When I said…well…you know. You were fucking there." Tray scowled again.

"When you said that she was your future girlfriend" Sam sniggered to himself.

"Yes!" Tray sighed. "When I said that. But she couldn't take the joke about the car, and she didn't really get it when I said that either."

"She called you names" Sam said, with a great deal of glee in his voice. "They weren't very nice ones. She knows a lot of synonyms for moron."

"Fuck off, dickbreath."

"Yeah, she may have even called you that" Sam said. And then he turned and started to walk off down the hall. "And an overly-optimistic shithead who doesn't understand rejection when it walks up and gives him the finger."

"She talks a fuck-load" Tray said to us. And then he walked out too.

"I really don't know what to say to that" I said to Eric. I didn't have a clue what Tray thought he was doing with that statement.

"Well…it's nice he's found someone he likes" Eric mused.

"Yeah…let's hope he doesn't know where she lives." I really didn't fancy having to explain to some poor mother why Tray had followed her daughter home.

"I kind of hope he does. One less mouth to feed wouldn't be a bad thing. Fuck off, Claude." Claude got pushed off the couch where he'd been trying to alert us to the fact he was hungry. Again.

"He just never fucking gives up" Eric commented, and I wasn't sure whether he was talking about Claude or Tray. Maybe both of them. They were both optimists at heart.

And so was Eric. "I wonder if there's any of the cake left" he said, and he wandered off down the hall. I could have said there was a fat chance of that because I was almost certain the kitchen had been Sam and Tray's first stop after they'd left us.

But I didn't. Everyone needed to be a little optimistic about something.

PPOV

I was starting to feel like I was never going to get out of hospital, that I was doomed to spend all my days in here pondering the weirdness that was my family.

And then I passed a fucking kidney stone. That was a fucking craptastic way to spend a Sunday morning.

I could have punched the nurse who told me I'd done well. I could have punched the other nurse who told me that at least I'd be home soon. I could have punched the doctor who told me I'd never complain about having a baby because I'd had a freaking kidney stone.

I did hug Dad when he came to take me home though, although it was slightly annoying when he wanted to check and double check that it was really OK. "They want to discharge me, let's let someone else have the bed" I said to him.

"No, but…how do they know there aren't any more?" Dad asked.

"They just do." I didn't have a freaking clue, but I wanted out. Now I understood why Ivan would stand with his nose pressed against the door, sometimes you just need to leave.

"I just want to ask…" he said, and then I had to wait while he bailed up some passing doctor and asked to have kidney stones explained to him. I don't think that guy had even been one of my doctors. I think he might have even been a nurse. I think he really wanted to get rid of Dad as quick as he could.

Luckily, the doctor seemed to be pretty good at that. And then we could leave. I'd don't think I'd ever been as happy to just be going home in my life. Home seemed like a pretty good place about now.

An hour or so into my recuperation, as Mum was calling it, things were looking a bit different. "I think I get to watch the TV because you know, passed a kidney stone" I said to Tray who was clutching the Xbox controller like I might try to wrest it out of his hand. I had, in fact, tried that manoeuvre before and I had a pretty good success rate if he wasn't expecting it and once, I 'd even to manage to hit him on the head with it when he was really distracted…but I wasn't up to that today

I hoped the sympathy vote would win me the TV battle.

"Nah. I was here first" Tray said, his eyes sliding back to the screen where he was busy shooting…oh, fuck knows what. I didn't care anyway.

"Yes, but I am recuperating."

"Go and recuperate in your bedroom then. Don't spread your germs out here."

"I don't have germs you fucking moron! And I want to watch the TV!" I may have stamped my foot, which was a stupid move because then Tray would know he'd won.

Never let the enemy see your weakness.

I took a deep breath, and tried another tack. "Tray…I think Mum's baking." I sat down on the couch.

"So?" He shrugged, but I'm almost certain he sniffed the air. Bugger. There weren't any baking smells. Mum was folding laundry and talking to Aud while pretending she wasn't, and occasionally squirting Claude with the water pistol. I'd got him for her earlier, but he just never gave up.

Time for plan C. "What's Sam doing?" I asked, hopefully giving off the suggestion I might go and see what he was up to, because it was bound to be interesting. It wasn't really. It was probably really, really stupid. But Tray didn't know that.

"Dunno" Tray said, and, annoyingly, he just kept looking at the screen and hitting the controller buttons.

"What did you do last night?" I asked Tray.

"Went out."

"Where?"

"Party."

God, it was like getting blood out of a stone, he wasn't giving me much to go on at all. "If you want to fucking chat about it though, go and talk to Sam." That was really not helpful, because I wanted Tray to go and talk to Sam so he'd leave the TV.

"Already did." I hadn't, but it didn't hurt to fish for something. I waited. "Uh-huh…fuck off you fucking piece of shit!" was all I got in response and most of it was actually directed to one of the characters on the screen.

"If you've come to gloat, fuck off" Tray said next, which I thought was also directed to the screen, after a minute I realised it was directed at me. Huh. So something had happened then.

I just didn't know what.

"So how are you feeling?" Maybe he was hung-over?

"Alright."

So not that then. Try again. "Bet you feel pretty, uh…stupid?"

"Fuck off."

"Sam had a lot of stories." I really hoped he'd bugger off and go and yell at Sam. I just wanted to watch the TV in peace.

"Sam talks a lot of shit. It was a joke."

"Didn't sound very funny." I think that seemed to be the gist of it. "Sam said it was fucking moronic." So please go and try to put him in a headlock, I thought to myself.

"Well…Sam doesn't…" Tray started to say, but then Sam walked in and said "What did I say?" which was bloody annoying, because nothing is worse than when you quote someone and you're lying and you get caught out.

Well, there are worse things, but this has to be up there with some of the worst. The trick was to lie low, and not reveal yourself. Give details, and you'll tie yourself in knots. So I stayed quiet.

"Just stop fucking going _on_ about it" Tray said, still trying to shoot things on the screen.

"Nah. It's fucking funny. Mostly because you honestly thought it would work and she'd…fuck I don't know what you wanted."

"Well, what do you fucking think? Oh, I remember. You don't. You don't do that sort of thing do you? Actually talk to girls, in case they fucking tell you to fuck off."

"Which is what happened to you, in case you didn't notice" Sam replied. It was interesting when they were arguing with each other but I kind of hoped they'd take it elsewhere. I wondered how I could get them to leave. It was a tricky one.

Still, it was better than being in hospital by myself.

"At least I fucking did something" Tray said, sounding exasperated. And then I think his character on the screen got killed because he looked really fucked off, and he threw the controller down on the couch next to him. That was progress, maybe he'd been so distracted he'd give up on the game and leave?

"Yeah…but no one does that, and expects it to work out" Sam said.

"What?" Tray asked.

"You know. Says 'oh, you're my future girlfriend' and then it happens. The world doesn't function like that." Sam picked up the other controller and sat down on the other side of Tray, which was absolutely not the result I'd been hoping for.

Tray frowned. Yes! I thought. He doesn't want to play with Sam and they'll go away. But then he picked the controller up again.

"Well…how do you think it works?" he asked Sam.

"Not like that. Not just from telling someone it's going to work out and then they'll want to be with you, just because you want it" Sam said. He looked at me. I nodded. I mean, it sounded reasonable. Tray was an idiot after all.

"But...but…nah" Tray said. He seemed to be having trouble forming sentences. "But think about it, eh? How do you think Dad's fucking here if it doesn't work like that?"

Tray looked at Sam, who didn't say anything; he just frowned and then turned to the TV and started pushing the buttons on the controller.

Huh. Who would have thought that Tray, who was not known for having any great insight and was mostly famous in the family for swearing, eating too much, and farting a lot, would actually say something that was kind of…well, smart?

"I'll play you next, Pam" Tray said.

"Only if you win, fucktard" Sam added.

"I can beat both of you, anyway" I said. It never hurt to be confident. It was like living with lions, sometimes. Or dogs. You couldn't show fear.

"Fuck up Sam and Pam" Tray said, and then he sniggered. "Pam and Sam like jam" he said, and I punched him on the arm, but it didn't exactly do much to him these days. Sam shoved him in the leg with his foot, but he didn't really do anything either. Tray kept sniggering.

God, that phonics worksheet had been a pain in the bum. We'd all got it at school and it was quite possibly the first thing Tray had learned to read because it amused him so much, and he'd quote 'Pam and Sam like jam' and 'Pam and Sam like ham' to us at every opportunity. And he still did.

He was, quite clearly, retarded.

But also maybe right about Dad.

Weird.

**Thanks for reading!**


	75. Bonus 2: Pretty in Pink

**A/N So, here we are. Final chapter. I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little sad.**

**This is probably not the end forever (as there is definitely some stuff I've promised I'll do), but it is an ending, so this is complete. For now.**

**I have, however, started a brand-new, shiny multi-chapter in a whole new universe. It's called 'Be There'. Hope you'll feel like checking it out.**

**And huge love and gratitude to everyone who has kept me going on this, and made my days with all your kind words, your favourites and your follows, and the simple act of just bothering to click on a chapter and read it. It has meant a lot to me.**

**Disclaimer: I'm far too sad. Don't make me say it.**

SPOV

Pam's recuperation was going as well as could be expected given the patient was a sixteen year old girl who was related to Eric. Pam huffed about having to rest up and then went to annoy her brothers, and, when she got tired, she got cranky that she was tired. She kept insisting she was fine, but still wasn't pleased if it took me too long to bring her the soup she wanted, and then I thought I might get fired over the total lack of crackers served with the soup. Instead I got a warning. A very long, involved, verbal warning which seemed to suggest I was basically suffering from xenophobia and was deliberately trying to stamp out all her links to something that was part of her cultural heritage.

Thirty minutes later she was bored again and we were friends because she wanted to help me make some muffins, and possibly eat the leftover muffin mix before her brothers got a look in.

It wasn't easy dealing with her as she roamed around the house looking for someone to yell at. I was always a bit jumpy in case she crossed paths with Eric and it all kicked off, but they seemed to have called a truce and the most they'd do is circle each other warily, a bit like Aud and Cordelia did when they were waiting to see if the other would lift a paw first.

I think Eric was trying to figure out a way to make it up to Pam, although you'd never guess from the way he eventually tried to engage with her. He decided it was wise to tell her to rest up because he wasn't taking her back to hospital and waiting around for a whole night again, and Pam's exceedingly loud arguments that you couldn't relapse from a kidney stone which you had already pushed out your urethra weren't convincing Eric, although I noticed that they made Tray duck and cover every time he heard the word urethra coming out of Pam's mouth. Even Sam hissing "Dude, that's not a girl thing" didn't seem to make Tray feel any less persecuted by the fact his sister kept shouting it from all the corners of the house.

So Eric heading off to work on Monday morning wasn't necessarily a bad thing, although I did get him to go and attempt to get Tray out of bed first, which meant I had to deal with the resulting noise of that confrontation. Eric didn't seem to be getting anywhere fast, and I was almost going to go with the back-up plan of getting Pam to go in there and yell 'urethra' several times when Eric finally quietened down and a shuffling Tray passed me in the hallway muttering about how it wasn't fair to have to be up this early during his fucking holidays.

Everything normal there then. As were the first words out of Pam's mouth. "I'm bored" she announced.

"I'm off-duty" I tried.

"Oh! Really?"

"Yeah, I've been on-duty for twenty five years Pam. I have exhausted my supply of creative holiday-fun solutions."

Pam sighed. "It used to be different."

"I used to be younger, but you all wore me down." I gave the surface of the oven a wipe-down and looked at the sun gleaming across the black surface. The sun might have been gleaming more had it not been partially blocked by the black presence on the window-sill who'd watched what I'd been doing curiously.

"Jesus Christ! Why do I get blamed for what everyone else did? I've only been here for sixteen years, so that's nine whole years that everyone else got to do fun things and now I have to pay the frickin' price for it!"

"That's excellent math, Pam" Sam said, as he walked into the room. It was a pretty dead-on imitation of Eric, but that didn't wash with Pam.

"Oh, bite me Sam!" she said, and she flounced out of the room.

"Wow, do you think they'll take her back?" Sam asked me.

"Public hospital."

"Dad'd pay for private."

"On what grounds would they admit her?"

"Umm…" Sam thought for a minute. "Severe personality imbalance inflicting trauma on her poor family."

"I don't think they're going to hospitalise every sixteen year old girl in the country" I advised him.

Tray came in, eating a banana. That was a little odd as he hadn't been here earlier and the bananas usually originated from the kitchen. "Is she yelling about her bits again?" he asked.

"Do you even know anything about anatomy?" Sam asked him.

"Yeah! At least, I know the bits I want to hear about." And although it probably wasn't really necessary, Tray decided to elaborate on that for our benefit. "Boobs."

"Mum's right there!" Sam pointed to me, which seemed a bit daft because I definitely was right there.

"Mum's got boobs."

"Euw."

"Dad doesn't think so."

Sam didn't even bother to try one of his Eric impersonations in response to that one. He just pulled a face and walked out of the room muttering.

"Where'd the banana come from?" I asked Tray, hoping to get to the bottom of the disappearing banana mystery. He shrugged. "Found it." That didn't solve anything.

Pam came back in. "I had to pass a kidney stone out of my urethra and ruin my whole holidays and nobody…" she paused, and the volume level in her voice dropped right down. "Where'd Tray go?" I shrugged. "See? Nobody cares" she complained. "So what are we doing now?"

Well I think Pam had won that round of 'who can gross out their sibling the most' but I was still stuck playing 'how to amuse Pam' with no hope of winning in sight.

And then I got some help because Pam's friend…or girl-friend, or, whatever she was, arrived with no warning. Well, I think she'd warned Pam, but Pam hadn't passed that on because she was in a snit as I wasn't providing on-tap entertainment. So the first I knew of it was when Pam shuffled in to the kitchen and said "Sara's here."

"What? Oh." Behind Pam there was a slightly less sullen teenage girl carrying a large carrier bag. She had blonde hair and a lot of eyeliner. She seemed fairly harmless.

"She's going to show us her dress. For the ball" Pam announced. Sara nodded. I was just surprised I was being included in the whole process. Was I supposed to give my approval too?

"I'll, um…I'll put the jug on" I suggested, hoping that if they wanted coffee they were happy with instant. I wasn't calling Eric to get him to come home and make coffee, I just wasn't. But I wasn't touching that stupidly large coffeemaker for anything.

"Uh-huh. We'll have tea" Pam announced, and Sara didn't contradict her. I could kind of see how this relationship was working out. For Pam, anyway.

I busied myself with that while Sara pulled the dress out of the bag and Pam examined it critically. "I think it'll work" she said, in the end. Sara beamed at her, and then she asked Pam "What're you wearing?"

Pam scowled, and I carefully put the tea in front of them and hoped that scowl wasn't going to come my way. "I haven't got my dress yet" she grumbled.

"We'll go tomorrow" I said, brightly. One thing about the school holidays was that I didn't have to run any classes, so at least I was free for emergency shopping trips.

"Oh" Sara said. "I think all the good ones are gone, though."

It was probably wrong to want to murder a kid who wasn't your own, actually, it was probably wrong when I wanted to murder my own kids too…but I'd kind of reconciled myself to the fact that was just part of motherhood. This felt decidedly more subversive. But all the same, I wished Sara would shut up about now.

"We can go to Modes" I said to Pam.

"Yeah, they have a list" Sara informed us. "You say what school you're at and they write up what dress you buy so there aren't any duplicates. Tamara…you know her? Yeah, she's got the same dress as me, but in black, rather than the red. So I don't think that'll matter."

She waited for Pam to respond. Pam was deep in thought, probably worried about her own dress situation, or lack of it, more than she was Sara's. In the end she managed to get out "I think you'll be fine."

EPOV

When I got home Sookie wasn't in the kitchen. There was something in the oven; I checked that, so I knew she hadn't run off. Aud was there though. Claude wasn't. I waited. "Oh, just give it a rest, Claude" Sookie said, from somewhere in the laundry room.

Mystery solved.

"Why are you in here?" I asked Sookie. She was holding a sheet up and frowned at me. "Why do you think, Eric?"

"Who are you hiding from now?"

"Well, not Claude because he bloody won't give it up and he's completely forgotten I've already given him dinner." Sookie glared at Claude, and Claude ignored her.

"OK…but so, everything's OK? Pam's alright?" Pam had been a bit, well, fucking grumpy since she got back. And she wouldn't take any of my advice about resting or not doing anything stupid. Mostly she wanted to annoy the boys and yell at everyone who got in her way.

"Apart from the fact she doesn't have a dress for the ball, everything's peachy. Claude! Claws out of the towel." I picked Claude up off the dryer and put him on the floor, where he sat and glared at me.

"Dress? She's still going?" That didn't seem right. She'd only just got out of fucking hospital; she surely shouldn't be going out to something like that.

"Well…yeah. I mean, I think the worst is over now the stone's gone. And you were all for the boys going out the other night."

That was different. They hadn't just been hospitalised, for one thing. Sure, Tray lived his whole life a fucking hair's-breadth away from either hospitalisation or incarceration, or both, but they weren't recuperating. "She's recuperating."

"Uh-huh. Well, she can recuperate at the ball. I mean, she can just sit at a table for a couple of hours, she doesn't have to do anything strenuous."

"Right. So she doesn't want to go to the after-ball party?" That was usually the big draw-card and where all the shit I didn't want to know about happened.

"Yeah…but you probably won't have to deliver your speech this time around. She's unlikely to be risking pregnancy for one thing." She did have a point, although I had that speech down to a fine art now. I think the version I'd given Tray had managed to succinctly hit all the points I needed to when I'd told him that "Whatever you think is a good idea at 2am, it really fucking isn't."

"I don't know" I said to Sookie. "I might have to say…something…"

Sookie sighed. "Yeah, I don't think it'll be required. And it certainly won't if she doesn't have a dress." Sookie looked at me. "And don't suggest the dresses in the wardrobe in the spare room. I don't think hand-me-downs are going to cut it this time."

"I merely suggested that maybe we should be, uh, recycling some of our older belongings."

"Jesus Christ, Eric. Who's paying you to write their sustainability documentation?"

"Um…just. Look, I wouldn't worry about that as long as I'm earning enough to fucking keep Tray in food."

"I ventured in to Tray's room today, mainly to open up the curtains and windows and try to air the place out. I found the stash." Sookie said, as she opened up one of the cupboards and attempted to add the towels she'd just folded into it.

"What stash?" I would have hoped Tray had more sense than to leave his porn just lying around. But then I would have hoped Tray had more sense than to pick up some girl's car and just move it. Apparently, he fucking didn't.

"The food" Sookie said, like I should have known what was going on. "You know how he's been telling us he needs all that fuel to keep himself going? Seems he's been hiding it, in case."

"In case of what?"

"I don't know! I've never not fed him. For one thing, he's only marginally less annoying than Claude when he's hungry, but even so, he thinks there might be a shortage soon so he's been hording food in his room. It was the fuzzy green mandarins in a bag in the corner of the room that alerted me to the problem."

"Oh. Uh…do you think I need to say something?"

"Possibly. But I don't think this is a 'don't do it at 2am' number. I think he might have had this idea at some point earlier in the day."

"I don't know. Maybe he wanted a midnight snack?"

"Maybe he just needs to stop depleting the pantry so I can get a handle on my groceries?"

"OK. I'm on it." Tray at least was easier to deal with than Pam. I walked into his room, and he looked up from his iPad. "Dinner?" he asked, with almost the same expression Ivan had when he was hungry, or wanted a walk.

"Not yet, because someone stole all the fucking groceries for their own personal use." He opened his mouth to protest, but I kept talking. "No more or I put a lock on the kitchen door and you're fucking buying all your own food."

"I just…" Tray spluttered.

"No. More."

Tray sighed. "I need a lot of fuel" he muttered.

"Then you need to fund that. You've got all that money set aside for the car, put it towards fucking bananas or whatever the fuck you want." Tray looked horrified at that thought. "Then if you're not paying for it, it's everyone's. Understand?"

"I was just moving it…"

"Understand?"

"Yeah."

"Great."

"Is it dinner?" Tray asked, as I left the room. I had no clue, but I hoped so. At least he'd been dealt with. I just wished it was going to be so easy to fix Pam's problems. "How are you?" I asked her, as I passed her bedroom.

"Oh, freaking wonderful. I have NO ball dress, and I am in permanent recuperation which, I believe, is just parent-speak for 'we hate you and you can't have a life anymore'. Also, Amelia and Felicia made Mum no fun and I have to pay for that. Everything sucks in here." She looked up at me from where she was reclining on her bed.

I wasn't sure I had an answer to that one.

"We'll, um…we'll get the dress, Pam" I said, and she snorted. "Yeah, that's like the royal we, isn't it, Dad? You're not _actually_ going to get me a dress. It'll be Mum, or worse, Mum and Amelia. And I won't be able to get one anyway, because they've all been sold. There's a list and you can't cross-purchase for the same ball. Plus, stock's depleted by this stage. EGGS have already had their ball. And AGGS. Grammar one is this week too, so…fuck. It's hopeless!"

I had a fond memory of the days when everything was solved by Amelia dressing up as a fairy. Days when Pam had thought I could actually fix her problems. Now she just thought I was fucking dead weight.

"Well…I'm sure it'll be OK" I said. Pam snorted again, but didn't reply.

SPOV

Just as I was about to turn off the light and go to sleep, Eric turned to me. "The dress" he said.

"Pam's dress?"

"Yeah. Just, uh…make sure it's a good one?"

"Well, I'll try" I said. I was only human, after all.

"Yeah, um, so…well. I was thinking she hasn't had much that's new in her life…so, um…"

I decided to fill in the gaps for Eric. "So money is no object?"

"Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, Sookie. We're still feeding Tray for one thing."

"And there's only so many sustainability documents you can write?"

"If I have to care about paper usage for one second longer, I might actually be forced to do something fucking drastic."

"Like, stop printing out all your emails?"

Eric smiled at me. "In my version, Sookie, there's more violence."

"Uh-huh. I think the trees you're killing probably feel it's all fairly violent."

"And yet, the Eric Northman-induced worldwide paper shortage has yet to transpire, Sookie."

"You wait, and then you'll be sorry" I warned.

"I wouldn't worry. I think it's highly likely that Tray's got a stash for that eventuality as well. I couldn't see the fucking floor in his room."

"No" I agreed. "I did clear a path to the window, but it wasn't going to last." I reached over and switched off the light. "I just wish Tray had a stash of ball dresses in there."

"If he does, I don't want to fucking know" Eric said, as he threw an arm over me.

So the next morning Pam and I went to Modes in Newmarket and looked through all the dresses. The ones that were there Pam rejected wholeheartedly. "They're so boring, and they'll be _exactly_ the same as everyone else's dress. I don't want to look like everyone else."

"Well, no… but, how about this one?"

"It's black." Pam pulled a face.

"Oh." I thought that was appropriate for a ball. Didn't everyone like black dresses? "This one?"

"Too…I don't know what those sleeves are doing. They droop. I don't want droopy sleeves."

"This?"

"Not strapless!"

"Um…something in…green?"

"It might as well be black." Pam's was now spitting out her words with barely contained contempt. I hoped that most of the contempt was for the dresses, but I suspected a lot was for me.

I really wished I'd been allowed to out-source this to Amelia, but Pam had vetoed that one.

"Um…oh! Look, how about the powder blue with the spaghetti straps?" I suggested.

"Maybe" Pam said, a little sullenly. Just then a sales assistant bustled over. "What school are you from, sweetie?" she said to Pam. She was brave. Sweetie was not a word I would have used to describe anyone with the expression Pam was currently sporting.

"Auckland Metro" Pam said. The sales assistant then directed us to the list she had for dresses for the school. "Oh, dear" she said. "It looks like that one's already going to your ball." She pointed to the blue dress I was still holding.

"Oh for fucking fuck's sake" Pam said, not all that quietly. "My day could not get any crappier, could it?" She looked at me for confirmation. I couldn't really reply to that. I just put the dress back on the rack.

By the time I'd done that, Pam was out the door and standing on the footpath outside the shop. "I'm done" she announced when I caught up to her.

"Well…I suppose we could try that shop in Howick?" It was unlikely that many people from school had bought their outfits in Howick.

"I don't want to go to Howick because they'll have the same dresses and they're the same dresses everyone wears every freaking year. It's sooo boring. I'm just…I'm over it. Totally over it." And with that, she took off in the direction of the carpark.

I was kind of sad about that. I hadn't exactly been enjoying the dress shopping, but I'd hoped that maybe we could get coffee or something.

Obviously I'd spent too many years hanging out with Eric and now I was completely missing the point of why you go shopping in the first place.

PPOV

I thought things would get better when I got out of hospital. They didn't really. Dad wanted me to take to my bed, as though I was some kind of Victorian hypochondriac who couldn't get through a day without fainting, and Mum was…well, Mum. She tried. But as she kept saying, she was only human. And apparently, getting me a ball dress I actually wanted to wear was outside the list of things humans could accomplish.

I felt that my chances of getting an alien dress in the next three days were pretty slight.

And then Dad came home. "So…dress?" he asked.

"Nope" I said, and his face fell and I felt crappy, like I'd kicked his puppy. Except that I wouldn't kick Ivan. I might kick Tray though. I didn't think Dad would feel so bad about that.

But kicking someone wasn't going to fix the problem of the dress.

"You went to buy one?" Dad asked.

"Yes, but there are no dresses that I can buy."

"There has to be _a_ dress, somewhere…" Dad said, but I stopped him. "There aren't. There are no dresses left that aren't already someone else's dresses, and the dresses that are there, are dresses I don't want anyway, because they're stupid dresses and Mum would have put me in green if she'd had her way."

"Uh-huh. So…no dress." Dad didn't say anything more; he just turned and walked out of my bedroom. I followed him into the hall just to see what happened next. Firstly he yelled at Tray, which was pretty standard, then he told Claude to fuck off, which happened all the time too.

He headed for the kitchen and I got close to the door and listened. I wasn't sure what I wanted to hear…well, no. I did know. I wanted Dad to fix it, like he'd fixed lots of things for me. I wanted to know he still cared enough to make it right for me. I wanted him to magically make it all better.

Instead he said to Mum "You'll have to try again tomorrow" and she replied "You're sure you don't want a go?" and then they discussed whether there were enough lamb chops for dinner.

While it was nice it was my favourite for dinner tonight, it didn't really help me with the dress problem though.

I drifted off. I felt a little empty. It had been stupid really, but part of the reason I'd said no to all the dresses was because I wanted Dad to do something. Well, that and the fact they were boring, or ugly, or boring and ugly.

I wasn't sure what to do next. I mean, I guessed it was up to me to find my amazing, perfect ball dress. I wondered about the ones Felicia and Amelia had worn, and walked into the spare room to look in the wardrobe in there.

There was a lot of crap in this wardrobe, but squished along one side were the garment bags where the old dresses were stored. I pulled out the first one. It had been Felicia's She'd worn it twice. Three times? No, only twice.

It was black. It had spaghetti straps and then it was just straight to the knees. It was boring as hell and so not what I wanted.

The next bag had one of Amelia's dresses. I think she'd been going for hip that year, and it was a sort of '20's flapper dress in the hideous colour combination of mint green and silver, the sequinned bodice falling to a skirt of chiffon over silk.

It was pretty out there. And sadly it hadn't suited Amelia, as the high neck had made her look too busty and the dropped waist gave her mid-section no definition. She'd looked horrific, but Riley hadn't cared.

I wondered what ever happened to Riley. And whether he ever found anyone who could dress herself properly?

The next dress was also Amelia's. It had weird bat-wing sleeves in chiffon attached to a dress in wide purple and black stripes. I'm not sure what Amelia was going for, but it screamed emo-bumblebee to me.

So that one was out too.

And then I pulled out the garment bag squashed against the wall and unzipped it. Huh. I wasn't sure I'd ever seen this dress in real life. I held it up and looked in the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. Yep. That was it. My dress was pretty awesome.

SPOV

Pam showed me the dress after dinner. "You want to wear that one?" I asked her, picking up the skirt and holding it out. Boy, I hadn't seen this in a while.

"Yes" Pam said, nodding her head.

"It's um…won't it be too long?"

"I'll take it up. And adjust the bust, take it in under the arms…um, well…at the waist…" she looked at me apologetically. "Yeah, it'll be fine."

"Can you do the alterations?"

"Oh. Um. Well…" Pam examined the dress. "Yeah" she said nodding. I tried to dampen down the feeling I had that Pam's yeah was a lot like Eric's insistence that he'd painted lots of rooms before attempting the spare one at Merton St. Neither of them liked you calling them on their bullshit, and it wasn't going to make them stop doing it.

And I didn't like my chances of trying to talk Pam out of wearing this dress. It looked like she was going to be wearing the dress I wore at my civil union with Eric to her school ball.

"OK then" I said "It'll be like _Pretty in Pink_."

Pam nodded. "I will be. Pink _is_ my colour."

"Oh. No." I felt old. None of the kids got my pop culture references. "No, it's a movie. And the main character wears her mother's dress to the school ball…uh, prom. Well, part of the dress. She cuts it up."

"Uh-huh. I'm going to move some of the roses, too" Pam said, looking at my dress critically. I guess I was going to have to stop thinking of it as my dress.

"We should watch the movie" I suggested.

"If you want" Pam replied, in a way that made it seem she was only doing it to humour me.

Well, she probably was. But that was what you had daughters for, surely?

We downloaded the movie and watched it together, although Tray stuck his head in see what we were doing long enough to ask "What's this shit?" and then announce "All the guys have weird, boofy hair." In reply Pam said "And you have a weird, boofy head" without taking her eyes off the screen and Tray left again.

When the movie was finished I turned to Pam. "Well?"

"I just…OK. I don't get why she wanted _him_. I mean, the geeky kid was _OK_…I guess. But really she should have asked that woman from the record shop out. I liked her hair."

"Uh-huh. Well, glad you liked it."

Pam shrugged. "It didn't totally suck. Right, better do some more on the dress." Then she left the room. I guess, as far as a mother-daughter bonding moment went, that was as good as I was going to get.

Still Pam at least wasn't complaining about being bored anymore. Not now she had the dress to alter and was going full-tilt at it. I got drafted in to help pin things a couple of times, but sewing had never really been my forte and there was a lot of sighing about the way I did things and even at one stage the suggestion she might ask Sam in to help instead, but she made the mistake of letting Sam hear that one and the look of horror on his face as he practically ran down Tray down in the hall to get out the door faster said it all really.

So Pam was stuck with me. "I'll have to take the belt bit off, of course" she announced. "So that I can get the waist taken in."

"Oh. OK." That sounded reasonable to me.

"Or…maybe I could just take all of it in" Pam said, inspecting the waist a little more closely. "I mean, it's attached…and the seam goes through it…so…."

I was lost by this point. "Maybe we should go to a dressmaker?" I suggested, and Pam looked horrified. "No! I can do this!"

Well, I guess I just had to take her word for it.

EPOV

"Where's Pam?" I asked as we sat down for dinner.

"I think she's sewn herself into that dress" Tray said, not looking up from his plate, and not really pausing before bites of food. Now he'd had his supply of extra snacks cut off it was like watching a starving man have his first taste of real food in weeks.

Pam walked in the room at that point and flicked Tray on the ear, but it didn't slow down his eating. "You are such a moron" she said.

"How's it going?" I asked. I was a bit vague on what was happening with the dress. Apparently she was altering one she'd found in the closet in the spare room, I guessed one of Amelia's or something. There seemed to be an awful lot of secrecy surrounding it.

"OK" Pam replied with a shrug, as she sat down.

"So is it the…uh…" I tried to remember what dresses Amelia had worn. "The, um, the…" Nope couldn't remember any. Not really. I had a vague impression of her getting dressed up and going out. There'd been a lot of sparkle. That I could remember.

"No, not the mint and silver" Pam finished for me. OK. Must be Felicia's dress then. I was pretty sure that had been black. I think Pam liked black.

It would probably look really nice on Pam. I just hoped she was fucking happy with it. I didn't think I could take any more of her disappointment.

PPOV

After about a day I realised I'd perhaps bitten off more than I could chew. Mum standing around looking vague and occasionally throwing in the odd 'if you're sure' really didn't help. I needed something far more definite. And every time she said "Where's a kitchen full of helpful mice?" it didn't really help me one little bit.

"I'd rather have the fairy godmother" I said, around a mouthful of pins, as I tried to unpick one of the roses without destroying.

"I can't help with that" Mum said, and then she went back to watching me.

Thank God for Google. And YouTube video tutorials. And the fact that the woman who made Mum's dress still had a shop and her dressmakers were actually kind of nice to me when I rang them that time when Mum was out at the washing line and I begged them for instructions on how to take the waist in. I may have sounded as though I was on the verge of tears when I called, which I think is what swung it for me. I emailed them a photo and they sent back a nice little picture of what I should do, and I had to promise to send them a photo of me wearing the finished product, along with an old one of Mum so they could put it on their website.

It didn't seem like a bad deal, really. I was tempted to tell Mum she was getting pretty good after-sales service on a dress that was decidedly older than me, but I didn't. It was kind of nice she was so impressed I could alter it all by myself. "It's not that difficult, once you get into it" I said to her.

"You know who could sew?" Mum asked. "My Gran. She made a lot of my dresses, and then clothes for all my dolls, sometimes out of my old dresses, or the leftover fabric from them."

Oh. Well that explained why the Barbies in our house had been stuck in the 1980's for a lot longer than was really necessary.

Finally though, and with really no time at all to spare, the dress was finished.

"It does look lovely" Mum said. She sounded all kind of wistful. I guess it had been her's first and once upon a time she'd been the one who'd picked it because it was pink and pretty and had roses around the neck-line.

"Even on me?" I asked.

"Especially on you." Mum sighed. "OK, well. Take it off, hit the shower and then I think Amelia's going to be here in about twenty minutes."

I sighed. "I don't want her to make me look like a drag-queen."

"No. Well. Tell her to keep it toned down. She just…well, she wants to help out. You're her baby sister after all."

I was about to say I wasn't a baby, which was something I'd had to repeat a lot over the years and yet no one had ever seemed to grasp, and then I thought, 'fuck it', and I took off the dress and walked to the bathroom instead.

Amelia took an age doing my hair and make-up. Honestly, everyone thought Mum fussed, but Amelia was ten times worse. And she was grumpy. "Just sit still."

"I am!"

"Now, half-close your eye and look down so I can put the mascara on…and…no. You blinked, Pam!"

"You poked me with the wand!"

"I didn't poke you! You rubbed it with your eye-lid when you blinked. Now it's all smudgy and I'll have to get that off."

"You do realise I'm not your doll, right Amelia?"

She looked at me for a moment, and then she smiled. "'Course you are. There was no other reason to have another kid, if it wasn't for my benefit. Now shut up, sit still and, for God's sake, put your chin up!"

When Amelia was finally done, I stepped back into the dress. "It's lovely" Amelia said, as I twirled for her. "I always did like that dress." I stopped twirling and felt a bit bad. Maybe she'd wanted the dress for herself? I mean, it was finders-keepers and first in, best dressed around here. Literally sometimes. I think Sam and Tray only had one drawer of underpants between them. But as the eldest, did Amelia get the dress by right?

"But pink's not my colour" Amelia said. "I would have got it in purple. Or maybe black. With purple roses."

"Yeah. You would have." The Amelia version would have been quite different.

"And of course I can't take a bunch of crap to Melbourne if I'm going."

"You are, then? Going?"

Amelia shrugged, and sat down on my bed. "I'm flying over for an interview next week. I've already done a preliminary one, via Skype and they liked me enough over that one."

"Oh."

"Don't worry. I'll be only be a three hour flight away. You can come for weekends. It's not like Felicia who buggered off to the UK on us." Amelia looked around the room and not at me. I guessed she missed Felicia too. She was supposed to be home at Christmas, but Dad said that remained to be seen.

"Yeah" I said. "It won't be that bad."

"OK. So, time for the big reveal?"

"I guess." It was only Dad who hadn't seen the dress. I wanted it to be a surprise. I wanted to show him…well, that I was capable. That I wasn't going to have a crappy life like he thought I was, that I was OK, even if I was gay, and that it wasn't the end of the world.

I could still go to the school ball in my mother's pink wedding dress if I wanted to.

EPOV

"So, the limo is coming here?" I checked.

"Yes, Eric. Pam said it's picking up some of the others first, and then her."

"And the after-ball…?"

"Is at the house of that guy in her class…um, Than. Yeah. I have spoken to his parents."

"I thought Than was a girl?"

"I think the eye-liner confused you. Oh, I hear them. Well, I hear Amelia berating Pam for slouching. I think she's coming." Sookie held the camera up ready to take a photo.

"Ow! That is bloody blinding" Pam said as the flash went off.

"How come she gets the paparazzi?" Tray asked from the couch.

"How come you aren't working like your brother?" I asked him.

"Store's not open at night. Well, only on Thursdays for the late-night" Tray said. Yeah, fucking retail hours in this country. I felt sure that Tray's part-time job in an electronics store was supposed to get him out of the house a lot more than it did.

And then I looked at Pam properly. "What do you think?" she asked, and she twirled.

I thought that I recognised that dress. It was the one Sookie had worn when we'd been married, or civil unioned, or whatever. The term wasn't really important. The fact we were still here, together, another three kids later probably counted for a lot more than what piece of paper we signed on the day.

"It's vintage Annah Stretton" Pam said, mostly to Amelia.

"I remember when it was new Annah Stretton" Amelia said, dryly. "We kept losing Felicia in the shop behind all the racks of clothes."

"Yeah. I always wondered how many dresses they sold that summer with chocolatey finger-prints on them" Sookie mused.

"Who's got chocolate?" Tray asked, but everyone ignored him. Pam did another twirl. Sookie took another photo. Amelia hissed something to Tray about him being a moron. Tray reminded her she didn't live here.

And then, almost as a group, they clearly remembered I was here and turned to look at me. Well, most of them did. "Dad?" Pam asked. "Do you like it?"

"I…it's…_you're_ beautiful, Pam." She was. She was glowing. Maybe that was the shiny stuff Amelia had smeared all over her face, but I suspected that some of it was just Pam. She looked fucking radiant.

Pam's face broke into an even wider smile. "I did it all myself…well, I didn't make the dress, because obviously, duh, it was Mum's, but I did all the alterations on it, because it was a little big on me…"

"Just put socks in your bra, Pam" Tray interjected from the side-lines, but it was clear he wasn't raining on Pam's parade tonight.

"Just get a life, Tray" Pam said, mildly. "So, anyway, this is _much_ nicer than anything they had in the shops, and the new stuff at Annah Stretton would have cost a bomb, so this is kind of special, I think. Don't you think so, Daddy?"

"Um. Yes."

"I know!" Pam half-shrieked, still grinning. Seeing her like this, happy and looking like an adult was fucking scary and wonderful all at the same time. I wanted her to be happy, I did. She deserved it.

I didn't want her to leave me. It was just like the fucking first day of school all over again, and it really fucking sucked.

"OK, you guys should dance, and I'll take photos" Sookie said. "Tray put some music on."

Tray reluctantly got up off the couch and pushed some buttons on the iPod that was plugged into a dock in the corner. "What do you want?" he asked.

"Something slow and romantic" Amelia said, wistfully.

"God, I'm not fucking dancing with her then" Tray grumbled.

"No! Just Dad. I value my toes" Pam said, as she came over to me. She walked over to me, and held out her hands. "And I don't even need to stand on your feet anymore. We had some lessons at school, for P.E. Sara and I were great!"

"I'm sure you were." I put my arm around Pam and held her for a moment before we started dancing.

"You're pretty good too" Pam announced. "Mum always said you were." In the background I think Sookie called out "Smile!"

"Your mother has a lot of faith in me, Pam" I replied, as we moved around the living room. Maybe I wasn't doing too badly? "Watch out for Eddie" Tray commented.

"He'll fucking move." Well, he did after I stood on him.

PPOV

I realised this was my chance to finally try to get to the bottom of the mystery of Dad. We weren't exactly alone, Mum was shouting things at us and trying to talk to Amelia, who was busy arguing with Tray about what a waste of space he was, like there was an actual rebuttal to that, but I did have Dad's full attention.

"So is it odd? To see me, in Mum's dress?"

"Um…" Dad looked thoughtful, and I wondered if this was one of those times when he hoped we'd give up and go away without a proper answer. See? I was on to some of his tricks.

Eventually he spoke. "Not really. It does suit you."

EPOV

"I don't exactly look like Mum in it though" Pam said, a little sadly.

Strangely, she did. Somewhere in her face there was a weird echo of Sookie every time she smiled and seeing her in the dress just magnified it. For some reason, it comforted me. "It brings back some memories" I said in the end.

"Nice ones?" Pam asked, and I nodded. "So…you know, with, uh, well…hey. You know how you married Mum?" she asked. I nodded again. I did remember that, even without the prompt of the dress right in front of me.

I might occasionally put my glasses down and not immediately register where i was putting them, but I did remember the important stuff.

"Was that weird?"

"There was…a lot of black sand. And small children. I don't think it was conventional."

"No. Um, you know. Because you had to stay here? And be a dad? And…and…you know. Stuff." Pam seemed to have run out of descriptive phrases.

"Oh. Um. No." I glanced over at Amelia, and wondered if she'd said something about how the civil union was really all about her, but she was still listing all the things that were going to shock Tray when he moved out of home. Tray was patting Ivan and not listening.

"But you came so far? And you got this whole new…life? Was it because you get bored easily?"

"I was bored, but I wouldn't say I get bored easily."

"Oh. Was it because it was risk then? Mum always says you like risks."

"It was a risk, but it wasn't something I'd do simply for the fucking adrenaline rush."

Pam looked thoughtful; she seemed to be studying me quite intently. It was a little odd being scrutinised quite so thoroughly from such a close range. I glanced over at Sookie and she was smiling at us, with her head on one side looking a little wistful. I smiled back at her. It was a nice moment, despite the three hundred questions.

"So…it wasn't scary? Doing all of that? Because you knew you loved Mum?" Pam asked, glancing from me to Sookie and back again.

I looked back down at Pam. "It was fucking terrifying. But I was doing it with Sookie…so that made it a little better."

"You did it for her."

"Mostly, I did it for me. But I think it worked out for her, too." I winked at Pam, and she giggled a little at that.

"I don't think I could be that brave" Pam said. "You know, to give up everything I knew and just…go with it."

"Pam, I'll tell you a secret."

PPOV

Oh, good. This was it. I loved secrets, especially ones that were just between Dad and me. "What?" I asked.

He leaned down, and whispered into my ear and I first I thought I'd heard him wrong. "You're already braver than I've ever been."

"What? Oh." That was unexpected. Dad thought I was brave. Dad thought _I _was brave. I'd been so worried that Dad thought I was defective and he didn't really want me, and he thought I was brave.

Dad loved me.

And now I was going to cry.

"Are you OK, Pam?" Mum asked.

"Yes!"

"Don't ruin your mascara now, Pam. You were all bitchy when I put it on before and I'm not fixing it again" Amelia interjected.

"Why is she crying?" Tray asked.

"Shut up, Tray! I'll say urethra again." For some reason, that really grossed him out.

But not this time. "Ha ha. Penis!" was all he said in reply. Crap, he'd got over that one.

"You're alright, aren't you Pam?" Dad asked, gently. I didn't think he was just asking about the very real possibility of me crying my eyes out in his arms right at that moment. I think this was the big moment he sent me out into the world, in a pink dress with roses on it and I…

Sometimes I over-think things. Fuck it. I was just going to a ball and this was just a nice dance with Dad.

"Yep. I'm super."

"Of course you are. Tray, move your fucking feet."

SPOV

We waved Pam off in the limo when it arrived. Well, three of us did. Tray, I think, took the opportunity to go in search of left-overs he could eat while no one was looking. As we shut the door Amelia sighed. "I can't believe my baby sister is 16 already. Felicia can't either: at least I think that's what her text said." Amelia frowned at the screen on her phone. "Mostly she was talking about her hang-over."

"Yeah" I said. Eric was quiet, and I expected him to suggest coffee, but instead he started patting his pockets. "I'm just going out. For a while" he said. And then he found his keys on the hall table and walked out the door.

That was odd.

"So, want some tea?" I asked Amelia. We walked into the kitchen, where, sure enough, Tray was eating the remaining roast potatoes from dinner. "They were just sitting there" he said. "And I didn't take them anywhere."

"No, that's fine." I put the jug on and got out some cups and Tray left before Amelia could start telling him what life was like when there weren't any left-overs to graze through.

"So what's happening?" I asked Amelia, and that's when she took a deep breath and told me all about the job in Melbourne.

It was hard not to feel betrayed. I'd had a bit of practice at suppressing that feeling now, though. Every time one of the kids left home or left the country it felt the same way, as though I couldn't believe they wanted to be that far away from me.

But you had to let them go.

Eric got back just as Amelia was finishing up giving me the details, and then she had to repeat it for him. He mainly asked her questions about the company she'd be working for, and the support they'd give her for moving. He remembered to ask about moving allowances and housing assistance.

I just wanted to know where she'd have dinner on a Sunday night.

When Amelia had gone home I felt a bit sad and went to get ready for bed. Eric came in. "She'll be OK, won't she?" I asked.

"Which one?"

"Either of them. I don't want Amelia to go away and seeing Pam go off tonight…well. You know. She's the baby!"

"Sookie, you're about 11 years too late to that party. I tried to tell you when she went to school it was too soon."

"I know. And then, she just got big."

"And very independent" Eric added.

"Kind of stroppy."

"And very, very brave."

"I'm glad she got my dress, though. It feels good to pass it on. While I'm still here to see it."

"That sounds, uh, kind of maudlin."

I shrugged. "Just being practical, I guess. I mean, my parents missed out on a lot of my life. I try to appreciate what I get to see of our kids' lives."

Eric nodded and then sat next to me on the bed and we sat in silence for a while, and then he said "Hang on" and ducked out of the room. He came back in carrying a large bunch of flowers, one of the arrangements that come with their own water supply in a cardboard vase. "These are for you." Well, that explained where he'd gone then.

"For me? Why?" It was rude to ask, but I was curious. It wasn't like Eric had never bought me flowers, but he usually had a reason.

"We should celebrate" he said. "Rather than moping about them growing up and leaving us, let's celebrate our anniversary."

"Oh." I thought about that. "It's not our anniversary."

"It's _an_ anniversary, Sookie."

I thought about that statement. Nope, I had no clue. "What one?"

"I'm hurt you don't remember."

"It gets worse. I suspect you're making it up."

Eric sighed, and tried to look as wounded as his words would have me believe he was. He kept grinning though. In the end he announced "It's the anniversary of when we made Pam."

"_Made_ Pam? Oh." Who the hell kept track of things like that? I looked at Eric. Was this bullshit or did he really remember the date of the crappy day with his father. "It really is?"

"Well, undoubtedly. In the vicinity. In some time-zone anyway."

"Right." That explained a lot. "So, we're celebrating?"

"I think that's the best idea."

"But I didn't know. So I didn't get you anything."

"Well, Sookie. Blow-jobs are always appropriate." I giggled. "I'm deadly serious, Sookie. I think it's even on one of those 'what to give on each anniversary' lists."

"Yeah, right. Bloody Google it then."

"No, no. I don't want to spoil the moment by getting my laptop out."

"When you could be getting something else out?"

"I think laps will be involved."

I stopped giggling and looked at Eric. "I do love you, you know. Even if you try to bullshit me all the bloody time."

"Sookie, there is simply no one else I'd rather bullshit." He kissed me, hard. "Or fuck."

"Let's move on to that then."

"Whatever you say, Sookie."

EPOV

Pam was going to be OK. She was brave, and she was beautiful, and she was one of the best things I'd ever done. Sookie could take some credit of course, but I felt like I'd done OK with Pam.

I hadn't even had to give her the speech about behaving herself at the after-party. "Do you think she's having fun?" Sookie murmured sleepily, from her side of the bed.

"Yeah" I said. "I think Pam's pretty great at making it work for her."

"She gets that from you."

"Possibly. But I think…I think she's a better version of me." It was like software or something, eventually they did enough versions and it stopped fucking up your email when you tried to launch the calendar or whatever the fuck was wrong with the first version. Eventually all those individual pieces of code actually made something that was half-way usable and didn't make you want to throw your monitor out the window.

Eventually, you got a Pam.

"I like you though" Sookie said, as she ran her fingers up and down the arm I had draped over her. "I don't want a better version of you."

"And I'm very fucking thankful for that."

"Great. We'll celebrate that tomorrow night."

"That is a fucking excellent idea, Sookie."

And we did.

**A/N EGGS is Epsom Girl's Grammar School, AGGS is Auckland Girl's Grammar School, and Grammar is usually used to denote Auckland Boy's Grammar School.**

**Sookie's dress was the Annah Stretton Tin Rose dress. **

** . shop/Online+Store/Annah+Stretton+Weddings/Custom+Made/Tin+Rose+ **

**And thank you, as always, for reading.**


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